Vermont Studio Center: Recent Episodes
Vermont Studio Center
Founded by artists in 1984, the Vermont Studio Center is the largest international artists' and writers' Residency Program in the United States, hosting 50 visual artists and writers each month from across the country and around the world.
The Studio Center provides 4-12 week studio residencies on an historic 30-building campus along the Gihon River in Johnson, Vermont, a village in the heart of the northern Green Mountains.
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and was a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will have its world premiere in 2026. She has two books: her essay collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press and her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, was released with Pantheon in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.
m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in New York City. Her debut, mother (Penguin Books) was a finalist for the National Book Award.msredcherries.comAuthor photo courtesy of Barb DanielsonThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores connections between translation and migration. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, EcoTheo Review, Two Lines, Chimurenga, and more. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, Bard College, and Bucknell University. She received an M.Phil in Comparative Literature from New York University and worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative, where she served most recently as the Assistant Dean of the Microcolleges. The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Caroline M. Mar is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Water Guest, the Editors’ Selection for the 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series. She is also the author of Special Education (Texas Review Press), which won the 2019 X. J. Kennedy Prize, and the chapbook Dream of the Lake (Bull City Press). Carrie is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a member of Rabble Collective, and serves on the board of Friends of Writers. She is a longtime ninth grade health educator in her hometown of San Francisco, and lives in Oakland, CA. She has been granted residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale, among others. You can find her online at carolinemar.com. Author photo courtesy of Jessica Tong-Ahn. The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, Primordial, was published in 2025 from Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.maidervang.comThe 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Psyche Podcast. bianca-stone.comThe 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida. She is the author of GOOD GRIEF, THE GROUND (BOA Editions, 2023, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize) and SUPERSTITIONS OF THE MID-ATLANTIC (2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Prize). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Best New Poets, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and a shortlister for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize (UK), she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. You can read more at www.margaretbray.com, or online @m_rrray (instagram) / @mbrrray (BlueSky) The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Zara Chowdhary is the author of The Lucky Ones. A multi-hyphenate writer, producer, and educator from Chennai, India, she now lives in Madison, WI. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and an MA in Writing for Performance from the University of Leeds. She has taught courses in Hindi and South Asian cultures, protest poetry, and creative nonfiction. Zara spent her first decade as an adult working in film, advertising and media production including for studios like Eros Entertainment, Red Chillies, and Vinod Chopra Productions. Her work has aired on Channel [V], National Geographic India, and on American television for Turner Classic Movies. Her prose has appeared in anthologies like New Moons edited by Kazim Ali, as well as online for speculative and environmental journals like Flyway Journal, Cotton Xenomorph. zarachowdhary.com/the-lucky-ones The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Cherie Jones is a Barbadian novelist and short story writer whose short fiction credits include Reflex Fiction, The Feminist Wire, PANK, Eclectica, and BBC Radio 4. She is a former fellowship awardee of the Vermont Studio Centre and the International Writers Programme of the University of Iowa. She is an alum of the MA Writing Programme at Sheffield Hallam University where she was awarded the Archie Markham Award and the AM Heath Prize. Cherie completed her PhD at the University of Exeter where her research centered on the poetics of violence against women in contemporary Anglo-Caribbean literature. Her first novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021, the OCM BOCAS Prize in 2022 and the Internationel Literaturpreis Prize in 2023 and was translated into French and German. The French translation of her novel won the Prix Carbet des lycéens 2023. Cherie is at work on her second novel. The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Rigoberto González is the author of 20 books of poetry and prose, and the editor of Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology. His awards include the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Shelley Memorial Prize, Guggenheim, Lannan, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships. In 2025 he received the Ruth Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Poetry Foundation. He’s currently distinguished professor at the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark. poetryfoundation.org/poets/rigoberto-gonzalez The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine 2023), a Stonewall Honor Book also shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Mizna, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She has been a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center and currently serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). She grew up in a Lebanese family near Pittsburgh and now lives in Austin, Texas, with her wife. sarahcypher.comThe 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Kurt Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently, Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road, with 35 full-color illustrations by artist Julia Oldham. Winner of a Foreword Indie Silver Medal for science writing, Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog, tells the story of the first animal to orbit the Earth, the Soviet space dog Laika, who flew on Sputnik II in 1957. An Inside Passage won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. He is co-editor with James Perrin Warren of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez . Caswell’s essays, stories and reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, Orion, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, Terrain.org, and other publications. He is a graduate of both the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College (MA), and the Bennington College Writing Seminars (MFA). He is professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches writing, literature, and an intensive study abroad course while walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. kurtcaswell.comThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Charmaine Wilkerson is a Caribbean-American writer who is originally from New York and has lived in Jamaica and Italy. Her writing frequently explores shifting ideas of home, family and self. She is the author of two novels, Black Cake and Good Dirt, and her award-winning short fiction can be found in various anthologies and magazines. Her debut novel, Black Cake, was adapted for the screen as a mini-series. A former news and communication professional, Charmaine is a graduate of Barnard College and Stanford University. She is grateful for the support she has received from residencies at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Hedgebrook, and Vermont Studio Center. Author photo courtesy of Sian Trenberth.The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections: Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press/Atria, 2024), I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the winner of the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021–22 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark was the 2017–18 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Clark is currently working on Begging to Be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Atria. tianaclark.comThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Marcella Pixley has written five acclaimed novels for young people: Freak, Without Tess, Ready To Fall. Trowbridge Road and most recently, Neshama. Freak received four starred reviews and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, Without Tess was a Junior Library Guild Selection, Ready to Fall was named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. Trowbridge Road was a Junior Library Guild Selection. It was long listed for the National Book award and the Massachusetts Book Award. It was named a best book of 2020 by Shelf Awareness, Reading Group Choices and Mighty Girls. It was a finalist for a Golden Dome Award. Marcella's fifth novel Neshama (her very first novel in verse) was published by Candlewick Press in Summer 2025 and has been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. Marcella's debut picture book A Sip of Sunrise is forthcoming from Candlewick Press in 2026. Marcella teaches 8th grade Language Arts at Carlisle Public Schools in Massachusetts. marcellapixley.comThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. Cynthia is an alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), Anaphora Literary Arts, and The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension. For fifteen years, Cynthia worked with social movements for racial, gender, climate, and migrant justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Based in Los Angeles, Cynthia is currently working on screenplays and serving as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine. For more information, visit cynthiadewioka.com. Author photo courtesy of Jose QuintanaThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation
Carolyn Kuebler’s debut novel, Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, was published in May 2024 by Melville House. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season” (Massachusetts Review) won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay. She was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the award-winning New England Review in Middlebury, Vermont. carolynkuebler.com The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness published by Graywolf Press. His other collections include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage which received the Lambda Literary Award. Wunderlich has published individual poems in in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been widely anthologized. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Amy Lowell Trust, The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University. He is Executive Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program, and lives in New York's Hudson Valley. markwunderlich.comAuthor photo courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan. The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Bernard is the winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2024-2025 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography and a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the 2024-2025 Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. emilybernard.comThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Kim Coleman Foote is the author of the debut novel Coleman Hill, named a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, NAACP Image Award, and Audie Award, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Inspired by Kim’s family, Coleman Hill weaves fact and fiction to trace their Great Migration journey from Alabama and Florida to Vauxhall, New Jersey, examining the rarely-heard stories of black migrants in the suburban North. Kim’s forthcoming novel, Salt Water Sister, moves between 1700s and 1990s Ghana, looking at the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on three women’s lives, while exploring the cyclical nature of history and its continued impact on our lives today. Born and raised in New Jersey, Kim has received writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Center for Fiction, a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct fieldwork in Ghana, and writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Kweli, and elsewhere. kimfoote.comAuthor photo courtesy of Sara AbbaspourThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, W.S. Merwin Conservancy, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation, and U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker and won the 2024 Levis Reading Prize. FSG will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth. elisamariegonzalez.com Author photo courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Maya Marshall is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor. Winner of the 2024 Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, Marshall is the author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love (2022). Marshall co-founded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall is the recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Vermont Studio Center, and Emory University, among others. Her poems and essays have been published in or are forthcoming in numerous collections and publications including Prose for the People (Penguin Random House, 2025), American Poetry Review, the Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner. She serves as an acquiring editor for Haymarket Books and as a program consultant for the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a literary fellowship for writers impacted by carceral systems. mayamarshallpoetry.comAuthor photo courtesy of Ashley KaushingerThe 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Brendan Shay Basham (Diné) is Tó Ts’ohnii (Big Water) and Bit’ah’nii (Folded-Arms People), born for bilagáana (Irish, Scottish, English, German). A writer, artist, educator, and recovering chef, Brendan was born in Alaska and raised in northern Arizona. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and BA in Liberal Arts from the Evergreen State College. His debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished, was released August 22, 2023, from Harper Books, flagship imprint of HarperCollins.Brendan’s work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Santa Fe Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and Juked, among other publications. He is a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Writers, the Ucross Foundation’s first Native American Literary Award, and fellowships from the Truman Capote Trust, Writing By Writers, and Tin House. He is a fiction faculty member at UNR – Lake Tahoe’s Creative Writing MFA Program.papayathief.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Yale Review and has been honored with fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency and with the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and the University of Texas in Austin. Her third book of poems, An Authentic Life, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October 2024. The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental nonfiction. Their first book, Voice of the Fish (Graywolf, 2022), won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Initially specializing in Phenomenology and Visual Arts scholarship, they hold MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the École normale supérieure, Paris, and Concordia University, Montreal. They teach at Columbia University and live in New York with their wife, the writer Jaquira Díaz.larshorn.com The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
J. Bruce Fuller is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared at The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Director of Texas Review Press. jbrucefuller.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Claire Luchette is the author of Agatha of Little Neon and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Claire's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, VQR, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Granta, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, and Indiana Review. Their story "New Bees" won a 2020 Pushcart Prize.Claire was the 2022-23 Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. They've received grants and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the.Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, MacDowell, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, John Carroll University, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.They studied at Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Oregon, and now they teach creative writing at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.claireluchette.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, loves saturated color, and believes in queer possibility. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, City of Laughter, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in winter 2024. temimfruchter.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Jen Soriano (she~they) is a Filipinx writer and movement builder who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. Jen has won the International Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Fugue Prose Prize, and fellowships from Hugo House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen is also an independent scholar and performer, author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry, and co-editor of Closer to Liberation: A Pina/xy Activist Anthology. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Jen is also a co-founder of the cultural democracy institutions, MediaJustice and ReFrame. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen now lives with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea. Her debut book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, is now available from Amistad/HarperCollins. jensoriano.netPhoto Credit: Naomi Ishisaka The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Kerrin McCadden was the recipient of the 2022 Herb Lockwood Prize for excellence in the arts in Vermont. She is the author of two poetry collections, most recently American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, 2021), finalist for the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and on The Slowdown. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, The Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. McCadden holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at the Center for Technology, Essex. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.kerrinmccadden.net
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, published by Penguin. Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. They earned their BA in History from Brown University and MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Profess of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.iampaultran.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and The Rib King. Her most recent book The Last Suspicious Holdout, a collection of stories, was published in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly and Callaloo among other venues. She is a recipient of a Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida. She currently lives in New Orleans.ladeehubbard.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020), and the forthcoming Silver (FSG, 2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new edition of which is forthcoming from FSG) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. His translations, primarily from Catalan, have appeared widely; including his translation of Salvador Espriu’s classic short-story collection Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Phillips has written on contemporary art for Artforum as well as for David Kordansky Gallery. In 2021, an exhibition inspired by one of Phillips’ poems, “The Beatitudes of Malibu” debuted at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the President of the Board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic.A graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University, where he earned his doctorate in English Literature, Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He divides his time between New York City and Barcelona with his wife and two daughters.rowanricardophillips.comAuthor photo courtesy of Sue Kwon.The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Miciah Bay Gault is the author of the novel Goodnight Stranger (Park Row, 2019), which was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and selected for Poets & Writers’ First Fiction roundup. Miciah was the 2023 Shane Stevens Fellow in the Novel at Bread Loaf, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Agni, The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, The New York Times Modern Love Column, and other places. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is coordinator of the Vermont Book Award. miciahbaygault.comThe 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Ricardo Wilson is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books, 2021) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern UP, 2020). An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories was selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award. His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, Northwest Review, The Offing, and Stirring. Ricardo is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America.ricardoawilson.com
Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA CW at IAIA. Her memoir WHISKEY TENDER (HarperCollins) was named one of the most anticipated books to watch for in 2024 by Zibby Media with a publication date set for February 27th. She has won fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, A Public Space, and the NY State Summer Writer’s Institute. She earned her MFA in Iowa City, and her writing can be found in Salon, Brevity, LARB, the Best American series, and other places. She comes from the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo and is the editor-in-chief of River Styx Magazine. deborahtaffa.com
Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (UGA Press, 2008). He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Terrain.org, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in almost two dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. His poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and on The Slowdown podcast hosted by Tracy K. Smith. A selection of poems from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean. He has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.seanhillpoetry.comAuthor photo courtesy of Geoff Wyatt.
Nandi Comer is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. She is the Michigan Poet Laureate.nandicomer.comThe 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
christophermerrillbooks.com
Author photo courtesy of Ram Devineni
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; he is a longstanding co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
jasonschneiderman.net
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her most recent book is Gods of Want (One World/Random House, 2022). Her next books are a novel titled Organ Meats and a novella titled Cecilia. She lives in California.
kmingchang.com
The 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Talusan has published in Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Boston magazine, The Boston Globe, and other outlets and anthologies, including Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. In 2022, she was awarded fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Brother Thomas Fund. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.gracetalusan.comThe 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Her writing has appeared widely in periodicals and magazines in the US and abroad and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia’s writing is translated into Spanish, Bengali, Persian, Chinese, Tamil, and other languages. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Faizullah currently lives in Dallas.tfaizullah.comThe 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry -- most recently, Previously Owned (2022), and Scale (2017) -- both from Four Way Books. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review.nathanmcclain.comAuthor photo courtesy of Moe Nazemi Photography.
Crystal Wilkinson is the national award-winning author of Perfect Black (winner of a 2022 NAACP Image Award), The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in the The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Story, and Agni. Her most recent novel, a lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. Crystal identifies as a southern, feminist fiction writer, and grew up in the hills of Kentucky. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program and Associate Chair of the English Department. She is a 2020 USA Artist Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 O. Henry Prize winner and makes her home in Lexington, KY. Crystal is a fellow of the Academy of American Poets was named the Poet Laureate for Kentucky in 2021. Her culinary memoir, Praisesongs for the Kitchen Ghosts is forthcoming from Clarkson/Potter Penguin Random House in 2023. crystalewilkinson.netThe 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Jane Brox‘s fifth book, Silence, was published in January 2019, and was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It received the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her previous book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine. She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Brox has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The Georgia Review, NewYorker.com, Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission. She has taught at Harvard University, Bowdoin College, and in Lesley University’s low-residency MFA Program. She lives in Brunswick, Maine. janebrox.com
Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), and The Maybe-Bird (forthcoming 2022), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her poetry has recently appeared in POETRY London, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. Jennifer currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the Literary Assistant to the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.
jenniferfoerster.com/
The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Author photo courtesy of Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother's Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Black is the Body won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Emily’s previous books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age; and, with Deborah Willis, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her work has appeared in: Harper’s, TLS, The New Republic, The New Yorker, O the Oprah Magazine, Image, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and twin daughters.
The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
emilybernard.com
This recording starts at the last description of a series of slides which Maud Casey shared, and were part of the archival research for the book, City of Incurable Women.
Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, most recently City of Incurable Women, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. She is the recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, A Public Space, and Literary Imagination. She teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Washington, DC.
The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
maudcasey.com
Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.
phillipbwilliams.com/
Born in Taipei, Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton) and Mouth (Kaya Press), which won a writing award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has received a Writers’ Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and fellowships and residencies from the Center for Fiction and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Her work has appeared in Brick, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Brooklyn Rail, and other journals. She lives in New York City.
The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
lisahchen.com/
Author photo courtesy of Hisayo Chen.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. With E.J. Koh, she co-translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Catapult, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and more. She is co-director for the Adoptee Literary Festival and PEN America Miami/South Florida Chapter, and a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
marcicalabretta.com
The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Marcia Douglas is the author of novels, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her awards include a 2020 Creative Capital Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a U.K. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was long-listed for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
marciadouglas.com
Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including Atomizer, forthcoming from LSU Press, 2020, and Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, named a Books We Love 2016 by The New Yorker and a Small Press Bestseller. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.
You can read the second piece she reads here: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/some-girls-write-a-fearless-and-moral-inventory-by-elizabeth-a-i-powell/
Tina Escaja is a destructivist/a cyber-poet@, digital artist, and scholar based in Burlington, Vermont. As a literary critic, she has published extensively on gender and contemporary Latin American and Spanish poetry and technology. In 2003 she won the Dulce María Loynaz International Poetry Prize for her collection Caída Libre (Free Fall). She is the author of four additional books of poems: Respiración mecánica (2001/2014), Código de barras (2007), 13 lunas 13 (2011), and Manual destructivista/Destructivist Manual (2016) with English translations by Kristin Dykstra, a book selected among top ten bilingual readings by the Latino Poetry Review in April 2017. Escaja’s creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited at museums and galleries internationally. Her digital artifacts include the poetic series VeloCity (2000-2002), Código de barras (2007), Robopoem@s (2016), and Emblem/as (2017-2019); the interactive novel Pinzas de metal (2003); and her performance piece/poetry with sheep Negro en ovejas (2011). Escaja’s poems, fiction, and digital work have appeared in numerous anthologies and have been translated into six languages. She is the instigator of the Destructivist/a movement, initiated on the grave of Vicente Huidobro in October of 2014. A selection of Escaja’s literary and digital projects can be experienced at www.tinaescaja.com.
Kristin Dykstra appears in the June 2020 Words Without Borders Translator Relay, as well as a profile for Poesía en Acción paired with an excerpt from Marcelo Morales’ manuscript, “The Star-Spangled Brand.” Selections from Dykstra’s new poetry manuscript are forthcoming in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion and Seedings. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Cuban writer Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The book was also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards and received the Honorable Mention for Poetry in the Foreword Indies Awards. It was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, which also brought out the 2019 collection Materia Prima, a Finalist for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award, co-edited by Dykstra with Kent Johnson. Introducing Amanda Berenguer of Uruguay, Materia Prima features a team of eight co-translators. Previously, Dykstra translated Tina Escaja’s Destructivist Manual, and the University of Alabama Press published four of Dykstra’s book-length translations of contemporary Cuban poetry, including editions by Rodríguez, Flores, Angel Escobar and Marcelo Morales between 2014 and 2016. Her 2016 translation of The World as Presence, by Morales, was longlisted for the National Translation Award, and excerpts won the Gulf Coast Prize for literary translation.
This event was supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Cherline Bazile reads "God Hates Black Girls," a chapter from her novel in progress about a family on the brink of eviction. She is a Haitian-American writer from Florida. She received her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. She graduated from Harvard University and had the pleasure of attending Vermont Studio Center in June 2019. Cherline is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and her work has won three Hopwood Awards. You can follow her on Instagram @cherbazile or on Twitter @cherlinebazile.
Jennifer Brody is the award-winning author of “The 13th Continuum,” graphic novels “Spectre Deep 6” and “200,” and the Disney Chills book series, writing as Vera Strange. She’s a graduate of Harvard University and a film and television producer and writer. She began her career in Hollywood on many films, including “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Golden Compass." She lives and writes in Malibu by the beach where she’s hard at work on her next book. This is an excerpt from her short story "Let Me In." It will be featured in her forthcoming short fiction collection. The story was originally inspired by the Muslim ban, but also contains element of Cly-Fy (climate change science fiction) and more.
Her latest book release is Spectre Deep 6: https://www.turnerpublishing.com/books/detail/spectre-deep-6/
Disney Chills #1 is out July 7th: https://www.amazon.com/Part-Your-Nightmare-Disney-Chills/dp/1368048250
The 13th Continuum (Continuum Trilogy) is available here: https://www.amazon.com/13th-Continuum-Trilogy-Book/dp/1681622548
Website: www.jenniferbrody.com Twitter: @JenniferBrody FaceBook & Instagram: @JenniferBrodyWriter
Jonathan Vatner's first novel, Carnegie Hill, debuted in 2019 from Thomas Dunne Books. His second novel, The Bridesmaids Union, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press. He is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Poets & Writers; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in January 2019.
Read the full chapter here: http://www.midnightlit.com/archive/volume-3-summer-2019/palace-of-beauty/
Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA in fiction from NYU. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Kenyon Review Online, Santa Monica Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was the Rona Jaffe fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in June 2019. She has also received fellowships from the Writers Grotto in San Francisco and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. This piece was published in the Jan 2020 issue of Clarkesworld. It's available at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chang-eppig_01_20/ Twitter handle: @rche_types, website: www.rchetypes.com
In January 2020, Gwen enjoyed a blissful month at the Vermont Studio Center, where she worked on a work of creative non-fiction titled The Nine, the true story of nine women who escaped from the Nazis. One of those nine women was her great aunt Helene who first told Gwen her story. The book is scheduled to be published by St. Martin's Press in 2021.
Gwen is an award-winning children’s book author and poet, whose titles include Trail of Stones, The Night Shimmy, Ruth and the Green Book, and The Hiding Game. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous places including The New Republic, New England Review, Kenyon Review, London Sunday Times, and Catapult. She lives in Southern France with her three children and works as the Director at the Brown Foundation Fellowship Program at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, an artist residency program.
You can follow her work at www.gwenstrauss.com
And can find out more information about the residency program at https://maisondoramaar.org/
Linda Dittmar grew up in Israel during its formative years, 1939-1960. Coming to study in the United States, she received her Ph.D from Stanford University and for the next forty years taught literature and film studies at the University of Massachusetts. During that time she also taught at the University of Paris, held two Fulbright grants to India, the latter as Distinguished Chair, and lectured twice at Tel Aviv University. In addition to many articles and book chapters her writing includes the books From Hanoi to Hollywood; The Vietnam War in American Film and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Now Professor Emerita and longtime editorial member of Radical Teacher magazine, she is completing her memoir, “Tracing Homelands,” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing on the war of 1948. A longer version of the current chapter appears in the Bulletin of Harvard University’s Divinity School. Other excerpts were published in Jewish Currents, Nowhere, and Consequence magazines. Linda is particularly grateful for the support of VSC, where she wrote with joy and inspiration in May 2017, May 2019, and September 2019.
Joy Baglio‘s short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and PANK, among others. She's received fellowships, scholarships, and grants from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Speculative Literature Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and her writing has been recognized by numerous contests and awards, including The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest (Honorable Mention) and the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. She holds an MFA from The New School and teaches writing at Grub Street and at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, which she founded in 2016. She was in residency at VSC during November of 2019, and is currently working on a novel and short story collection.
"Belly of the Beast": http://americanshortfiction.org/new/belly-of-the-beast/ First published in American Short Fiction in November 2019 as a Web Exclusive.
Interview with Joy and ASF editor Erin McReynolds about the piece and the form of flash fiction: https://americanshortfiction.org/new/web-exclusive-interview-joy-baglio/
Meghan Moya Finn is a writer based in Somerville, MA and was a resident at VSC in October 2019. meghanmoyafinn.com
Eva Warrick was a resident in November 2019. Eva grew up near Seattle. She graduated with an MFA in painting. She taught visual art for several years and moved to Amsterdam in 2014, where she began writing. Her fiction has been supported by fellowships from Tin House and Yaddo, has appeared in A Public Space and Granta and is forthcoming in The Southern Review. She is represented by Seren Adams at United Agents in London. She’ll attend the Helen Zell Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan and split time between Ann Arbor and Amsterdam. She continues to paint.
"Natural History" was published in Granta and you can read it here: https://granta.com/natural-history/
Find Eva at https://evawarrick.com/
J.C. Hallman is the author of six books and a number of articles that have appeared in a wide array of journals and anthologies. He has been a McKnight fellow in fiction, and a Guggenheim fellow in the general nonfiction category. He was in residence at Vermont Studio Center in Fall 2018. The piece was first published in The Baffler. You can read it here: https://thebaffler.com/latest/lo-trump-eer-blooming-hallman Find J.C. at JCHallman.com and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1467692944
Kosiso Ugwueze was born in Enugu, Nigeria and raised in Southern California. Her short stories are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Subtropics, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the South Carolina Review. She has received residency and fellowship support from Kimbilio, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Vermont Studio Center where she was the Rona Jaffe fellow in February 2020. You can find Kosiso online at kosisougwueze.com.
Charlotte Reber attended VSC's Vermont Week in 2018 and is still in Johnson wrangling computers. She has at least one master's degree in children's literature from Simmons College, drinks far too much coffee, and spends most of her time these days struggling with the family cats for control of her keyboard. This recording is an excerpt from the collaborative efforts of Charlotte and her brother, Will Reber (@williamreber; www.willreber.com).
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, which was just released, and the poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, Kundiman, MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, among others. She worked on this book while at VSC.
Bethany Ball’s debut novel What to Do About the Solomons with Grove Atlantic was published in 2017. Judy Blume called it “funny, sexy, and smart” and it was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The novel was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Jewish Book Council’s debut novel prize, and the “The Bridge” Book Award. Ball has been published in The Common, American Literary Review, the Detroit MetroTimes and LitHub, and forthcoming from Zyzzyva. Her second novel, The Pessimists, is due out in 2021 from Grove Atlantic.
Ian Geronimo is an AAPI writer from Mesa, Arizona, who is currently at work on his first book. He was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in December of 2019.
Diana Fenves is a science fiction writer and playwright living in Raleigh, NC. She has a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and her fiction is represented by the Bent Agency. Her plays have been produced by The Slant of Light Theatre Company and several small festivals. Her work is influenced by her heritage as a Texan and Hungarian Jew. She is inspired by the Hungarian expression “life is hopeless, but not serious” and is passionate about confronting the unjust and the uncomfortable through art. Her website is www.dianafenves.com. She was a resident at VSC in April of 2019.
Ellen McCulloch-Lovell lives and writes in Montpelier, VT. Her book, Gone, was issued by Janus Press in 2012. She has served as president of Marlboro College, Chief of Staff to Senator Patrick Leahy, and director of the Vermont Arts Council. She was a VT Week resident at the VT Studio Center in 2018 and is the current Interim Executive Director there. "June Pruning" was published in Green Mountains Review: http://greenmountainsreview.com/june-pruning/ You can also read it below.
JUNE PRUNING
My husband stands under the lilac, clippers in hand, squints up at bare twigs among the heavy, spent blossoms. He parts the heart-shaped leaves with his blade before he nips the dry wood.
Surely, it’s the wrong season to be pruning, just as the pendulous flowers rot, exuding their last perfume.
Surely, there must be other chores this cool June morning: storm doors to be removed so we can walk out into fresh grass, the mowing, cutting back the burdocks before they invade the new field, sawing snow-bent saplings, which will never straighten, and will hang, grazing the ground, against all order,
but there he is, inside those dooryard lilacs – overripe, aphrodisiac – pruning away dead wood, preparing for the next profusion.
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of One Day We Become Whites (ND/SA, 2016). Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City. VSC: March, 20. IG: chialun.chang
Andrea Blancas Beltran is from El Paso, Texas. She is a 2019 CantoMundo fellow. Her work has recently been selected for publication in Scalawag, About Place Journal, 111O, A Dozen Nothing, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Fog Machine, Gramma, Pilgrimage, and others. Her chapbook profiles was published by Dancing Girl Press in February 2020. Another chapbook Re- was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in July 2018. You can find her @drebelle and http://www.andreabeltran.com/
Wawa is a Hong Kong poet and VSC alumna (Mar 2017 on a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship & Jun 2018 on a Henry Luce Chinese Poetry and Translation Fellowship). She's currently based in Berkeley, CA. More at www.lomeiwa.com
Samuel Hughes is a student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He was a Staff-Artist at the Vermont Studio Center 2017-2018, and now lives in Burlington. His insta and twitter handles are both @samhugheslives
Francine Conley is a poet and performing artist. She was a VSC resident in 2015 and 2018. Her recorded poem "Joy" was written at VSC in January 2018 and published at https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issue-7-winter-2019. Her first book of poems, What Sweetness from Salt, was published by Finishing Line Press, 2019. For more on her arts: http://francineconley.com/
Sarah Audsley has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Recent work appears in Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Memorious, Scoundrel Time, Tupelo Quarterly, and is forthcoming in New England Review and Pleiades. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as the Staff Artist, Writing Program Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.
Tim Mayo was a Vermont Artist Week Fellow in May of 2006, 2008, and 2018. His second volume of poetry, Thesaurus of Separation, (Phoenicia Publishing 2016) was a finalist for the 2017 Montaigne Medal and a finalist for the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award. His poem “The Uncapping” was first published in Verse Wisconsin 102. This revised version may be read at https://winningwriters.com/resources/the-uncapping and is included in Thesaurus of Separation. His most recent collection is Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books, 2109). More of his poems may be read at his website: https://www.tim-mayo.net
Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir and three books of poems. HIs new collection of micro essays "Beyond Repair: Living in a Fracture State" is due out from Red Hen Press this fall. He was a resident at VSC way back when dinosaurs roamed the mountains.
Carolyn Kremers writes poetry and literary nonfiction, and teaches part-time at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was a writing resident at VSC in November 2017. Her books include Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Eskimo Village (memoir), The Alaska Reader (literary anthology), and Upriver (poetry). She was a Fulbright Scholar at Buryat State University in Ulan Ude, Russia, in 2008-09 and again in 2015-16. Her website is http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/carolyn_kremers. Read about Marina Tsvetaeva below.
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)
Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva is considered one of the four major poets of the Soviet era, along with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow and grew up in an educated, upper middle-class family. Her first collection of poems, Evening Album (Вечерний альбом) was self-published in 1910 and well-received in Moscow literary circles. In 1912, at age nineteen, Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron. They had three children: Ariadna ("Alya," 1912), Irina ("Ira," 1917), and Georgii ("Mur," 1925). Sergei joined the White Army in 1917, and Tsvetaeva did not see him again for five years. In 1922 – having lost three-year-old Ira to starvation and having barely survived the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed – Tsvetaeva moved with Alya to Berlin and on to Prague, where Sergei had fled and was attempting to finish a university degree. In 1925, the four of them immigrated to Paris. For many years, Tsvetaeva wrote in exile and poverty.
In 1937, after the outbreak of World War II, Sergei and Alya decided to return to Russia. Sergei had become a Soviet sympathizer, and Alya, who was twenty-four, was working for a French Communist newspaper. Tsvetaeva loved Russia deeply, but she was worried about returning. Mur begged to follow his father, however, and so, in summer 1939, Tsvetaeva returned with Mur to Moscow. Josef Stalin's political purges in the Soviet Union had ended, but people who had lived abroad were viewed suspiciously, as were people who had been academics and intellectuals before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva was unable to find work or to publish, and within a year, Sergei and Alya were arrested on charges of espionage. Sergei was executed, and Alya was sent to a prison camp.
In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, Tsvetaeva and sixteen-year-old Mur were evacuated from Moscow to the village of Elabuga (Елáбуга), in the Tatar Autonomous Republic. There, on August 31, in the entryway of the small, wooden house where she and her son were staying, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. She was 48.
Heidi Reszies was a VSC James Merrill Poetry Fellow in October 2015. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Illusory Borders (published by The Operating System, 2019) and Of Water & Other Soft Constructions (selected by Samiya Bashir as winner of the 2018 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize for Poetry).
Of Water & Other Soft Constructions is available for purchase online through Anhinga Press (please see link on my website: heidireszies.com/books )
Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Imperial Liquor (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), Darktown Follies (Tupelo Press, 2013), and Red Summer (Tupelo 2006). A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, his honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Dorset Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, VSC, Bread Loaf, and Cave Canem. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a resident in April 2019.
Avia Tadmor was a Vermont Studio Center poetry fellow in June 2018. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and is a Language Lecturer at New York University’s Expository Writing Program.
Genevieve DeGuzman (VSC, James Merrill Poetry Fellow, September 2019) writes stories and poems. Her poetry appears or will appear in Cimarron Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Folio, RHINO, Rust + Moth, phoebe, and elsewhere. “Topsy” was originally published in Glass. Born in the Philippines, raised in California, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she brews kombucha and gazes dreamily at Wy’east, while perpetually perfecting her hygge and a novel-in-progress.
Read “Topsy” in Glass Link: http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2019/february/deguzman-topsy.html
Twitter: @gen_deg Web: genevievedeguzman.carbonmade.com
Ricardo Hernandez is the son of Mexican immigrants. A recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary, Poets House, and Poets & Writers, his work has appeared in Muzzle, Witness, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. A semifinalist for the 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, Ricardo holds an MFA from Rutgers-Newark and lives in Jersey City. "Feedback" was written at Vermont Studio Center when he was a resident in September 2019. It is published in MumberMag and you can read it here: https://www.mumbermag.me/2020/01/11/feedback-by-ricardo-hernandez-image-proof/
Nandi Comer is the author of the American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Northwestern University Press, May, 2020). She is a Cave Canem fellow as well as a Callaloo fellow. She is a 2019 Kresge Artist Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Muzzle, The Offing, and Southern Indiana Review. She was a resident for the first time in May 2010 and most recently, this past year. She was a staff artist August 2014-July 2015. This poem is published in her upcoming book, which you can purchase here: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/content/tapping-out
Social media: @nandicomer (Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter)
Tessa Micaela is the author of Where Bells Begin (Rescue Press, November 2019) and there are boxes and there is wanting (Trembling Pillow Press 2016). Currently living and working in central Vermont, Tessa practices clinical herbal medicine and generative/reproductive care. Tessa was a VSC Vermont Week resident in April of 2018. You can read the poem below.
website: tessamicaela.com IG: turkeyvultures FB: tessa.micaela
at last/ the body is so salty that/its long story dissolves/the mirror -after Inger Christensen
lacewing aflame, lacewing longs for sound, and chicory and lengthened dashes of blue, the world wets and waters and warms, turns the corner to sundown and ice again, stretching horizon of broken, or cracked and shattered silhouettes of hooves or claws, how close they’ve come in the dark, human animals wake to stories of ecology, home disordered beneath carbon cover, I mean to say lace exists, lace and amines and teeth and balsam nests and titles which sideways into making in the night and humans dream, and gossamer gas lines protrude across corn and memory, it is too cold to have children anymore, and plastic dolls and cigarettes embracing in the floating continents which gather near the ice islands, and here the Winooski river, frozen, or nearly so, and fragmites exist, beside cattails and calamus, in swamps that refuse construction, poisoned by Boeing and Lufthansa, thudding across the corroded sky and honey and clocks tremble on shelves, faucets ignite, and the bones, bones so dry their long song hoarsely lingers, at last, aflame.
Benjamin Aleshire received a James Merrill Fellowship to attend VSC in March, 2020. His work has appeared in The Times UK, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Lit Hub, and London Magazine, and he has received support from Bread Loaf, the Vermont Arts Council, and the University of New Orleans. Ben travels the world with a manual typewriter, composing poems for strangers in the street. The first chapter of his novel-in-progress, POET FOR HIRE, was selected by Nathaniel Rich as the winner of the 2019 Words & Music Festival prize. "Love Poem" is from Ben's poetry manuscript, FAKE NOOSE, a finalist for the 2020 Alice James Award. He lives in New Orleans, and serves as a contributing editor for the Green Mountains Review.
A Cave Canem alum, Richard Hamilton's poems have appeared in The Ringing Ear: Lean South, Cave Canem Anthologies, CONSEQUENCE magazine, and Steel Toe Review. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama and MA in Arts and Philosophy from New York University. He has been awarded fellowships from the Chautauqua Literary Arts Festival and The Vermont Studio Center where he was resident in August 2019. His first collection of poetry, due out this Fall, will be published by Re-Center Press. He lives in Washington, DC.
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist and licensed builder. Her first full-length book, A Wake with Nine Shades, was published by Texas Review Press in 2019. A hybrid text of visual poetry/erasure is forthcoming from TRP in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, jubilat, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Connecticut River Review Prize, a Writers@Work fellowship and grants from Warren Wilson College, the Sewanee Writers Conference and Vermont Studio Center where she was a resident in January 2017 and October 2018. The poem "Wake In The Woods" was first published in Sycamore Review.
Link to order book: https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680031911/a-wake-with-nine-shades/ Website: https://www.jennifersperrysteinorth.com/ Instagram: @jssread Facebook: HerRead and Jen Sperry Steinorth Twitter: JenSSread
VSC President Emeritus Gary Clark was born and raised in New Haven county, Connecticut. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English and Drama in 1986, and from the University of Oregon with an MFA in Poetry in 1992. From 1996 to 2014, Gary led the Writers Program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, where he lives with his wife Laura and their three children. He was a staff artist from 1993 to 1994. His email is gpcjr@mac.com. You can read "The Old Ways" below.
THE OLD WAYS
For awhile I turned to honesty and openness, but all that happened was the people I loved got tired. After careful consideration, I have decided it is now time to go back to the woods, build a fire, find a rock, sit down, and share a poptart with my shadow, as I used to do, see the flames flickering in my face as the one place no one knows is there. There used to be a time, not too, too long ago, when things that sounded like this were actually like this, when through a hole in my Carhartts I entered new nowheres, great beautiful fluids bubbling up out of the moss at my feet, distance and wind and quiet and dark and clean and weightless and empty and easy and gone and all the same thing as me, back then, back there, where I argued and fought and cheated without fear. One time, in an orchard sloping down toward a big lake, arithmetic made sense, and so did leaving. There was nothing to do, the cold apples were everything, I drafted a letter made of miles and apologies. Looking back now on everything, I wish a couple things: first, that I could understand where things have gone, and second, that you and I could always go. Things could be easier, that little bird says, the way they never were; we could be friends, I could learn to speak, we could share a soda and pretend we were free of the old ways, broken free, finally free.
Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. A recent graduate from Michener Center for Writers, he is a 2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was a resident in August 2019 and wrote this poem during that time.
Hanae Jonas’s poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Iowa Review, jubilat, West Branch, The Volta, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art, Kundiman, Mineral School, and the Stadler Center for Poetry. She was the VSC/Kundiman Fellow in November 2018. “Ritual for Spelling Silence” originally appeared in Twelfth House. Website: www.hanaejonas.com
Los Angeles based painter and poet Kamaria Shepherd (b. 1991 in Houston) has exhibited nationally and internationally at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, CA; New Release Gallery in New York, New York; Human Resources in Los Angeles, CA; SoCal MFA Juried Exhibition at the Millard Sheets Art Center in Pomona, CA; Black Light at the Otis Graduate Studios in Los Angeles, CA; Palazzetto Cenci at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Rome, Italy; and Circolo Degli Artisti in Rome, Italy. Kamaria earned an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from UCLA in 2018 and a B.F.A. in Painting concentrating in Literary Arts from RISD in 2015. Kamaria is the 2018 UCLA recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. She was also the Swan fellowship recipient during her September 2018 residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
HA RECOLLECTION
Y’all ain’t coming to da house You know tha house The one with yo relatives you never see The ones that never see you, or acknowledge you
Y’all ain’t coming to da house Tha out house the old heads spoke of Hi they didn’t have basic plumbing and slept on a mud floor with just walls, No ceiling looking at the stars every night and how the rain seeped in
Y’all ain’t coming to tha house With the bed that held all of them together siblings and all said it wasn’t right for boys to be in the same room with girls, even brothers That’s why her children each had separate beds
Y’all ain’t coming to tha house Her momma told her not to have a lot of babies by a man They don’t treat you the same and definitely not any better Don’t you marry a dumb man but you can be a dumb woman
It is honored It is recommended
Y’all ain’t coming to that house You are too pretty to be so mean Stop that talk Just be quiet and sit pretty
Y’all ain’t coming to that house I was twenty-nine in that photo, and skinny, and my hair was long After I had left that house I got married, I wasn’t gong to stay there and get whipped by my daddy
Y’all ain’t coming to that damn house Doesn’t look hi she used to Doesn’t answer hi she used to Doesn’t smile less she has to
Y’all ain’t coming to that damn house Doesn’t try less she has to Doesn’t write less he has too Doesn’t cry like a baboon Doesn’t whine by blue moon
Emily Pittinos is a Great Lakes poet and essayist currently teaching in Boise, ID. A December 2019 Poetry Fellow at VSC and an Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest, her recent work appears, or will soon appear, in Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Ninth Letter, The Adroit Journal, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. "I Grow Less Visible" was originally published in Third Coast Magazine.
Khaty Xiong is a poet from Fresno, California. She is the author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), which holds the distinction of being the first full-length collection of poetry published by a Hmong American woman in the United States. Her work has been featured in Poetry, the New York Times, How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), as well as Academy of American Poets and Poetry Society of America websites, and elsewhere. Xiong was a Vermont Studio Center Fellow in the month of January 2020. The poem, “Banished,” was first published in 2019 on The Margins, the digital magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop: https://aaww.org/trials-in-the-winter-two-poems-by-khaty-xiong/ Twitter: @khatyxiong Instagram: @khatyxiong
Joshua Aiken is a writer based in Connecticut whose poems have been featured in publications such as Assaracus, Forklift, OH, juked, Nepantla, NightBlock, TENDER LOIN, fog machine, and Winter Tangerine Review. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a winner of the Martin Starkie Prize, and was a May 2018 and July 2019 resident at the Vermont Studio Center. He is currently a JD/PhD student in History and African-American Studies at Yale. "Demand" was originally published in BOAAT and can be read here: http://www.boaatpress.com/demand Instagram: jaikes101 Twitter: jaikes101 Facebook: facebook.com/joshaiken
Andrea Martin was a resident at VSC in October 2016 and was the Writing Program Coordinator staff artist from 2017-2018. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently living in Iowa City, where she's finishing a Master's in Library & Information Science at the University of Iowa.
Kylie Gellatly is a poet living in Northern Vermont. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Adroit Journal, Green Mountains Review, Pleiades, and The Rumpus. She is the Book Reviews Editor and Editorial Assistant for Green Mountains Review. Kylie has been awarded the Factory Hollow Press Scholarship to the Juniper Writing Institute and two Vermont Studio Center fellowships. She was a resident in 2019, in May for Vermont Artists Week, and also in August and October. Instagram: @kyliegolightly
Carlene Kucharczyk is the current Writing Program Manager at VSC and was the Writing Coordinator staff artist the year before. She was the Henry David Thoreau fellow at VSC in September 2017. “On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body” was originally published in Tupelo Quarterly, and you can read the poem here: http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/on-beholding-the-beloveds-rotting-body/ Thanks for listening!
Sydney Lea is author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Here (Four Way Books, 2019). A former Vermont Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer finalist, he has also published a novel, a collection of literary criticism, and four volumes of personal essays. His collaborative work with former Delaware Laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, is now available, and his newer literary essays, The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life, will be out in 2020, as will his book-length mock-epic poem, The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother's Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She lives in Burlington, Vermont with her husband and twin daughters.
Jennifer Elise Foerster earned her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA Low-Residency Program, and co-directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Jennifer is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. She lives in San Francisco.
Bushra Rehman is a poet, novelist and cultural activist. Her novel Corona, a dark comedy about being Muslim American, was noted by Poets & Writers among the Best Debut Fiction of 2013. Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. She has served as a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Urban Word NYC, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon was released in 2018 and her first YA novel Corona: Stories of a Queens Girlhood is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan in 2020.
Heid E. Erdrich is author and editor of eight books, including the poetry collection Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. Heid edited New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press and co-edited Sister Nations, an anthology of Native American women’s writings. Her non-fiction memoir-in-recipes, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes was a 2014 City Pages Top Food Book. Heid's awards include two Minnesota Book Awards, the 2018 Native Arts and Cultures Fund National Fellowship, three Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and the Loft-McKnight Fellowship in prose. She works as an educator, interdisciplinary artist, and independent visual arts curator. Heid has collaborated with visual artists on award-winning poem videos and animations created with an all-indigenous crew. Her most recent book incorporates her poem videos via QR codes. Heid teaches in the Augsburg College Low-residency MFA program. Heid E. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
Sue Halpern is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. Halpern is the author of seven books, most recently, Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her book Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly was made into an Emmy-nominated film. Halpern has written on science, technology and social issues for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and many other publications in addition to The NYRB. She is the director of the Middlebury Fellowship in Narrative Journalism and the former editor of NYRBLit, an electronic publishing imprint of New York Review Books. Halpern received a BA from Yale University and a doctorate from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001)—a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök is one of the earliest founders of Conceptualism (the poetic school of avant-garde writing made famous, in part, by the activities of Kenneth Goldsmith). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of “sound-poems” (particularly Die Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters)—and he has performed lectures and readings at more than 200 venues around the world in the last four years. Bök is on the verge of finishing his current project, entitled The Xenotext—a work that requires him to engineer the genome of an unkillable bacterium so that the DNA of such an organism might become not only a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity, but also an operant machine that writes a poem in response. Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he currently teaches Creative Writing and Literary Studies in the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia.
SARAH AUDSLEY has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Recent work can be found in Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Memorious, Scoundrel Time, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as the Staff Artist, Writing Program Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.
Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River--named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant--and All Back Full; and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice Low-Res MFA Program at Pine Manor College. Visit him at www.robertlopez.net.
Akiko Busch is the author of Geography of Home, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, Nine Ways to Cross a River, and The Incidental Steward. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays about design, culture, and nature have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She has taught at the University of Hartford and Bennington College and is currently on the faculty of the Design Research program at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Furthermore Foundation, NYFA, and Civitella Ranieri. Her collection of essays, How to Disappear, will be published by Penguin Press in spring 2019. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
Juliana Spahr's most recent book of poems is That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015). In addition to many volumes of poetry, she has written criticism and edited several poetry anthologies and collections of essays. Her Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in fall 2018. Spahr is on the English faculty at Mills College in Oakland, CA.
D. A. Powell's books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, Powell has taught at Columbia, Stanford, University of Iowa, Davidson College and University of San Francisco. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Noy Holland is the recipient of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story “Tally” was included in Best American Short Stories, and read by Suzzy Roche at Symphony Space in New York City. Her books include I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories; the novel Bird; and three collections of short fiction and novellas-- Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published fiction and essays in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She has taught since 1997 in the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Ralph Angel’s latest collection, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also has published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.
Rosa Alcalá has published three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE, and two edited collections, Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, and Cecilia Vicuña: New & Selected Poems, which also include her translations. A runner-up for a PEN Translation Award, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Fundación Valparaiso. Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, Alcalá is Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing & Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas-El Paso.
Krista is usually on the other side of the microphone, but here she's the one answering questions. If you're curious about podcasting, or guests or themes of On Being, or Krista's thoughts on life and writing, listen in. She also shares a bit about her book in process. She's published two New York Times bestselling books: Einstein's God and Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His debut novel, The Fishermen (2015) was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize 2015. It has been translated into 26 languages and is being adapted into a stage play. The novel was the winner of the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for Debut Literary Work, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Transition, The Guardian, New Statesman, and The New York Times, among others. He is a professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His second novel will be published in Fall 2018 by Little, Brown and Co.
Dan Chiasson is the author of five books of poetry: Must We Mean What We Say: A Poem in Four Phases (forthcoming, Alfred A. Knopf), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), and The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Chiasson is the poetry critic for The New Yorker. In 2007, he published his critical work One Kind of Everything (University of Chicago Press). He is Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Rosanna Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Douglas Trevor is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He is currently serving as Director of the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Doug is the author, most recently, of the short story collection The Book of Wonders. His novel Girls I Know was the recipient of the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize. His first short story collection, The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction. Doug is also the author of the academic monograph The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England. Doug's short fiction has appeared most recently in Ploughshares Solos, The Iowa Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Minnesota Review, and New Letters. He has also had stories in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and more than a dozen other publications. His stories have been anthologized in — among other places — The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
Kyoko Mori is the author of three nonfiction books, The Dream of Water, Polite Lies, Yarn, and four novels, Shizuko’s Daughter, One Bird, Stone Field, True Arrow, Barn Cat. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harvard Review, Fourth Genre, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, Conjunctions, The Best American Essays, and other journals and anthologies.
She teaches in George Mason University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA Program. Kyoko lives in Washington, DC with her two cats, Miles and Jackson.
Maud Casey is the author of three novels, most recently The Man Who Walked Away; and a short story collection, Drastic. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, A Public Space, and Literary Imagination. Her nonfiction book, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions was recently published by Graywolf Press. She has received the Italo Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at the University of Maryland.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of Heaven, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, and The Ground: Poems, for which he received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Granta, and many other publications, and he has written about soccer and basketball for The Paris Review. The author of the influential critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Philips is also the translator of Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth as well as numerous other works from Catalan, Spanish, and Italian.
Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the BreadLoaf Conference, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House. Jackson is a Clinical Associate Professor of Writing at New York University.
https://www.mitchellsjackson.com Photo by: John Ricard
W. S. Di Piero is the author of eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Tombo. Winner of the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared frequently in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Threepenny Review, and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and other periodicals. Di Piero has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award.
Noy Holland is the recipient of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest book, I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories, was published by Counterpoint in January 2017. Her novel, Bird (Counterpoint), appeared in 2015. Holland’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf.) She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps, and two books of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day. A new hybrid collection of poetry and prose, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, recently won the Independent Publishers Book Award’s silver medal. Matthews is currently serially publishing The Life & Times of American Crow, a “collage novel in 11 chapbooks,” and working on a series of micro essays on race, class & culture.
Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2016) and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also directed The Poetry Project in NYC which she helped found in 1966. She is the author of over forty books of poetry, including the book-length hybrid narrative poem Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House 2011)which is the winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Other recent books include Gossamurmur, (Penguin Poets 2013), Jaguar Harmonics (Post-Apollo Press 2014) and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House 2014), an anthology co-edited with Laura Wright. Her most recent book is Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, (Coffee House 2016) Waldman is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013-14) and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She is a frequent collaborator with poets, dancers, musicians and visual artists and performs in festivals around the world. She is the founder, with Ambrose Bye and Devin Brahja Waldman, the band collective Fast Speaking Music and the Fast Speaking Music productions which have issued more than than 25 albums. She recently received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for long-life achievement. She curated the Voz Alta poetry performance festival at Casa del Lago in Mexico City April of 2017 which included participants Raul Zurita of Chile, Guillermo Gomez Pena of Mexico/USA, and Thurston Moore of the US and UK.
Eileen Pollack is the author, most recently, of the novel, A Perfect Life, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2016. Her other novels include Paradise, New York, and Breaking and Entering, which was awarded the 2012 Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. She is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction, Woman Walking Ahead, is soon to be a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was published in 2015 by Beacon Press. A new novel, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, is due out in 2018.
Eileen has received fellowships from the NEA, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her novella “The Bris” was chosen by Stephen King to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007; other stories have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes and prizes for best fiction of the year from Ploughshares, Literary Review, and MQR. Her essay “Pigeons” was selected by Cheryl Strayed for the 2013 edition of Best American Essays. She divides her time between Manhattan and Ann Arbor, where she is a professor on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.
Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Laux teaches poetry in the Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University and is a founding faculty of Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program.
This event is supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Paul Russell is the author of seven novels, including Immaculate Blue and Boys of Life. Two of his novels, The Coming Storm and The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, won the Ferro-Grumley Award, and three have been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Sea of Tranquillity was chosen as one of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels by the Triangle Publishing Group.
He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, attended Oberlin College, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English from Cornell University. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writers Fellowship, he has taught at Vassar College and the University of Exeter.
His poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Epoch, Carolina Quarterly, The James White Review, Sou’wester, The Black Warrior Review, American Short Fiction, Lumina, The Barcelona Review, Men on Men 4, The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica, Sequoia, The William and Mary Review, Queer 13, Gastronomica and Best Food Writing 2001. His work has been translated into thirteen languages.
Photo credit: Tuan Ching
V. V. Ganeshananthan's debut novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and chosen as one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Atlantic Monthly, among others. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the American Academy of Berlin, she has been visiting faculty at the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She presently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota. She is at work on a second novel, excerpts of which have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014.
This event is supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Photo credit: Preston Merchant
Ross Gay is the author of three books: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and it was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
Ross is the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin' in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.
Photo Credit: Natasha Komoda
Gladys Swan has published four novels, including "Carnival for the Gods" (Vintage Contemporaries Series) and "Ghost Dance--A Play of Voices" (LSU Press, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), which was reprinted as part of "A New Mexico Trilogy" (published by Serving House Books). "A New Mexico Trilogy" also contains "A Dark Gamble," and "Ancestors." Additionally, she has published eight collections of short fiction, of which the most recent is "Jungle: Stories from the Sewanee Review." The title story received the annual award for the best fiction in the magazine for 2015. She has twice been a Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center and has held residencies at Yaddo, the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico. The Carnival Quintet, the outgrowth of her first novel, will be published by Kiwai Media in Paris.
[The story excerpts on this recording are read by Marie Howe.]
Hester Kaplan is the author of the story collections The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Unravished, and the novels Kinship Theory and The Tell. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories series. She is the recipient of an NEA, the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction, and the Salamander Short Story prize, among others. She was most recently Acting Director of the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing, where she is on the faculty, and is co-founder of Goat Hill Writers (goathillwriters.com). She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. You can read more about Hester at hesterkaplan.com.
Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books and a poetry chapbook. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2006 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program. His latest book of poetry, Unidentified Sighing Objects, (CavanKerry Press) came out in September, 2015; his novel, Tom o’ Vietnam, about an American veteran of the Vietnam War who is obsessed with King Lear, was published in Autumn 2017 by New Rivers Press. His essay on Willem de Kooning appeared in Best American Essays 2014. He lives with his wife Janet in Montpelier, Vermont, where he conducts numerous workshops in his house.
Howard A. Norman is an American award-winning writer and educator. Most of his short stories and novels are set in Canada's Maritime Provinces. He has written several translations of Algonquin, Cree, and Inuit folklore. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Vermont with his wife and daughter.
Norman worked on a fire crew with Cree Indians after dropping out of high school. It is during this time that he became fascinated with their folk stories and culture and spent the next sixteen years living and writing in Canada's Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Greenland. He also received his high school equivalency diploma, and then studied at Western Michigan University Honors College, receiving Bachelor of Arts degrees in zoology and English. He then earned a Masters of Arts degree from the Folklore Institute of Indiana University.
His most recent novel, My Darling Detective, was published last year.
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of SO MUCH SYNTH (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); OUR ANDROMEDA (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), which was a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013"; HUMAN DARK WITH SUGAR (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and INTERIOR WITH SUDDEN JOY (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999). Shaughnessy's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, The Nation, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.
Jane Shore’s six books of poems have garnered many prizes including the 1977 Juniper Prize, the 1986 Lamont Prize, and a 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. A YES-OR-NO ANSWER, (2008) won the 2010 Poets Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, she was also awarded two grants from the NEA. Widely anthologized, her poems appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Yale Review. THAT SAID, New and Selected Poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. She has taught at Harvard (The Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English), Sarah Lawrence, Tufts, M.I.T, the University of Washington, and was the Distinguished Visiting Poet at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. A Professor of English at the George Washington University for twenty-five years (after a year as the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington) she lives in Washington, DC and in East Calais, Vermont.
Jensen Beach is the author of the short story collection Swallowed by the Cold, as well as a previous collection of stories. His work has appeared in A Public Space, the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College and the MFA Program in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Vermont with his family.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). A Cave Canem Fellow and winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, she teaches in the Drew University MFA program.
Photo credit: Sheila Griffin.
Curtis Bauer is the author of two poetry collections, most recently The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013). He is also a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish; his publications include the full-length poetry collections Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Alice James Books, 2014) and From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz (Vaso Roto Ediciones, 2015). He is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks, the translations editor for From the Fishouse and Waxwing Journal. He teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has taught in numerous writing programs including Emerson College, Boston University, Bowdoin College and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and is the author of a collection of stories and seven novels, including EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE. THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET won the L.L.Winship/PEN New England award and THE FLIGHT OF GEMMA HARDY, won the New England Independent Booksellers’ Award in fiction for 2012. She lives in Cambridge, MA and is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her eighth novel, MERCURY, was published in September 2016.
Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer, and Conjunctions. Her honors and awards include four Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Smith, Baruch, Vassar, and the University of California at Irvine, among others. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City. Learn more at www.sigridnunez.com.
Photo Credit: Claire Holt
Major Jackson is the author of four collections of poetry, including Roll Deep, which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award; Holding Company; Hoops; and Leaving Saturn , which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Jackson has published poems, essays, and book reviews in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, New York Times Book Review, and in several volumes of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other honors. Jackson has taught as visiting faculty at Adelphi University, New York University, Columbia University, University of Massachusetts-Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence and the Sidney Harman Writer in-Residence at Baruch College. He is the Richard A. Dennis Green & Gold Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award and the Dorset Prize. He won a 2001 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. He edited an anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010); and with Katherine Towler edited A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2012). Ilya was a 2008 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellow; has served as a Writer In Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy; and worked as a Law Clerk at Bay Area Legal Aid, and National Immigration Law Center. He lives in San Diego, California, where he teaches at San Diego State University.
Michelle Latiolais is Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of the novel Even Now, which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her second novel, A Proper Knowledge, was published in 2008 by Bellevue Literary Press. She has published writing in three anthologies: Absolute Disaster, Women On The Edge: Writing From Los Angeles and Woof! Writers on Dogs. Her stories and essays have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, Santa Monica Review, Iowa Review and the Northwest Review. Widow, a collection of stories, involutions and essays, was released in January 2011 from Bellevue Literary Press. Recent work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Santa Monica Review, Juked and The Kenyon Review. Her new fiction, She, was released in May 2016 by Norton & Company.
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
Vermont Studio Center is grateful to the Rona Jaffe Foundation for their continued support of women writers.
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990).
His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection "Alabanza", about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and will be reissued in a new edition this fall. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Photo credit: Ram Devineni.
Porochista Khakpour was boron Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She is the author of The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic). Her memoir Sick is forthcoming in 2017. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Bookforum, Al Jazeera America, Vice, GQ, The Paris Review Daily, Elle, Spin, Slate, Salon, Poets and Writers, The Rumpus, Guernica, among others. Currently she is the Writer in Residence at Bard College.
VSC thanks the Rona Jaffe Foundation for their continued support of women writers.
Patricia Smith is the author of Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with Chicago photographer Michael Abramson; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012) – winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Bobbitt from the Library of Congress; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008) – a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. She also authored Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006) – a 2005 National Poetry Series Selection; Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1993); Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland Books, 1992) – which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award; and Life According to Motown (Tía Chucha Press, 1991). She is a Guggenheim fellow and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. She has written and performed two one-woman plays, one of which was produced by Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theater Workshop. She is a Cave Canem faculty member, teaches in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, and is a Professor of Creative Writing at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island. She lives in Howell, New Jersey.
Vermont Studio Center thanks the Rona Jaffe Foundation for their continued support of women writers.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author two poetry collections, In No One's Land and My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer. Her third collection, Dolefully a Rampart Stands, is forthcoming in 2019. She works as the Associate Director of the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College and is on faculty at the New England College Low-Residency MFA. She recently left Vermont for rural Connecticut.
Vermont Studio Center thanks the Rona Jaffe Foundation for their continued support of women writers.
Amina Gautier is the author of the short story collections At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award, The First Horizon Award, and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Agni, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and StoryQuarterly. Gautier is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Callaloo, Hawthornden, Hurston/Wright, Key West Literary Seminars, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Gautier teaches in the Department of English at the University of Miami.
We are grateful to the Rona Jaffe Foundation for their support of women writers.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and attended Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), won the 2002 New York/New England Award. His second collection, Mixology (Penguin, 2009), was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Literature. His most recent book, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, the 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of the Julia Peterkin Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is working on a new collection of poems and a graphic novel.
Evie Shockley is the author of four collections of poetry—including the new black (Wesleyan 2011), winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, and a halfred sea (Carolina Wren Press 2006)—and a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa 2011). Her poetry and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, with recent or forthcoming work included in The Best American Poetry, The Best American Experimental Writing, boundary2, The Break Beat Poets, Obsidian, Poetry, Siécle 21, The Volta Book of Poets, and The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry. Her work has been honored and supported with the 2015 Stephen Henderson Award, the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Currently serving as creative editor on the Feminist Studies editorial collective, Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, NJ.
Thanks to the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Jensen Beach is the author of the collection Swallowed by the Cold, as well as a previous collection of stories. His work has appeared in A Public Space, the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College and the MFA Program in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Vermont with his family.
Afaa Michael Weaver (born Michael Schan Weaver, 1951) is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, beginning with Water Song (U Virginia 1985) which was published in the Callaloo poetry series by Charles H. Rowell. Afaa received the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award for The Government of Nature (U Pitt 2013), the second book in his Plum Flower Trilogy, which began with The Plum Flower Dance (U Pitt 2007) and concludes with City of Eternal Spring (U Pitt 2014). His other poetry awards include four Pushcart prizes, inclusion in Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), The May Sarton Award (2008), the Gold Friendship Medal (2005) from the Beijing Writers’ Association, an appointment as a Fulbright scholar (2002) to teach at National Taiwan University, and a Pew (1998) fellowship. As a playwright, he has had two plays produced professionally. Rosa was produced as small equity at Venture Theater in Philadelphia in 1993, and also in 1993, he won the PDI award in playwriting from the ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago for his play Elvira and the Lost Prince.
His B.A. (1986) is from the University of the State of New York and his M.A. (1987) is from Brown University. He teaches at Simmons College and in Drew University’s MFA program in poetry and translation. Afaa was the first African American poet to serve as Poet in Residence (1997) at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center. He was first faculty at Cave Canem in 1997, and in 1998, he was named the first Elder of the Cave Canem organization. Afaa’s works have been translated into Arabic (Like the Wind, translated by Wissal AlAllaq) and Chinese. Afaa has intermediate level fluency in Mandarin.
Robert Cohen’s books include Amateur Barbarians, Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now, The Organ Builder, and a collection of short stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. Prior to teaching at Middlebury, he taught at Harvard, Rice, the University of Houston, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. His stories and essays have appeared in Harpers, Paris Review, GQ, The Believer, and many other magazines, and his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers Award, a Ribalow Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.
Howard A. Norman is an American award-winning writer and educator. Most of his short stories and novels are set in Canada's Maritime Provinces. He has written several translations of Algonquin, Cree, and Inuit folklore. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Vermont with his wife and daughter.
Norman worked on a fire crew with Cree Indians after dropping out of High School. It is during this time that he became fascinated with their folk stories and culture and spent the next sixteen years living and writing in Canada's Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Greenland. He also received his high school equivalency diploma, and then studied at Western Michigan University Honors College, receiving Bachelor of Arts degrees in zoology and English. He then earned a Masters of Arts degree from the Folklore Institute of Indiana University.
April Freely's work has appeared in Seneca Review, Gulf Coast, New Madrid, and elsewhere. A recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant, she has also been awarded fellowships from VSC, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation. She served as Writing Coordinator in the Staff-Artist Program in 2016.
Vermont Studio Center President, Gary Clark, and his son, Roland Clark, share their work: Gary reads his poetry, followed by Roland's brief cadenzas on violin.
Sabina Murray lives in Amherst, MA, with her family, where she directs, and teaches in, the Creative Writing Program at UMass. She is the author of the novels Valiant Gentlemen, Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn, and the short story collections Tales of the New World and The Caprices, which was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award.
All women Visiting Writers at VSC are generously supported by a grant from The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Arnie (Tzu-Ying) Hung is a writer from Taiwan. She is the author of two short story collections, Under no sunshine, Practice of undesired, which were published in Taipei. She is writing her new novel, The tip of the branches, with a National Culture and Arts Foundation Grant for Novel Writing & Publishing Project (Taiwan). She lives and works as a screen writer in Taipei with her dog “Nori”.
Mikko Harvey lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find his poems in places such as Colorado Review, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Sixth Finch, West Branch, and Best New Poets. Thanks to an Emerging Artist Fellowship, he spent November 2016 at VSC, where he wrote poems and was happy.
Paige Buffington holds both a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Though her work is primarily poetry, her residency at Vermont Studio Center inspired an interest in lyric essays. She currently lives in Gallup, New Mexico.
Nat Schmookler is a writer from Virginia and New Mexico. His work has received support from Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hawthornden Castle, among other institutions. He now serves as the Interviews Editor at The Utopian.
Carol Moldaw’s most recent book is So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (2010). She is the author of four other books of poetry, The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, Through the Window, Chalkmarks on Stone, and Taken from the River, as well as a novel, The Widening (2008).
All women Visiting Writers at VSC are generously supported by a grant from The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Dana Levin was born in Los Angeles, California in 1965 and grew up in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of three books of poetry: In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial. Her fourth book of poetry, Banana Palace, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in Fall 2016.
All women Visiting Writers at VSC are generously supported by a grant from The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Susan Steinberg is the author of the story collections Spectacle (Graywolf), Hydroplane (FC2), and The End of Free Love (FC2). She is professor of English at the University of San Francisco.
All women Visiting Writers at VSC are generously supported by a grant from The Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Taylor Johnson is a poet from Washington, DC. They have received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Lambda Literary Foundation, VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, the Lannan Center at Georgetown University, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Recently, their work appears in the minnesota review and Callaloo.
Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His honors also include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Davis grew up in Tacoma, Washington—though he was raised by much more of the Pacific Northwest—and he teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Carl Phillips is the author of thirteen books of poems, most recently Reconnaissance(FSG, 2015) and Silverchest (FSG, 2013). Phillips has also published two books of prose, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination, and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry; and he is the translator of Sophocles’s Philoctetes. His awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections, Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. A third novel, Prosperous Friends, was noted in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2012. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Harper’s, NOON, The Kenyon Review, and The Oxford American; her stories have been anthologized in The Vintage Book of New American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Among other honors, Schutt has twice won the O. Henry Short Story Prize. She is the recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships. Schutt has been a writer-in-residence at the University of California-Irvine, Richmond University, Syracuse, Hollins, and Washington University. She has also taught in writing programs at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington and Barnard. Schutt lives in New York. Christine Schutt's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Toi Derricotte's most recent book is The Undertaker's Daughter. Her honors include the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and the The Paris Review. With Cornelius Easy, she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996, and she is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Toi Derricotte's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
He Xiaozhu, Jimu Langge, and D Dayton have been working together on poetry for more than ten years. Having begun their writing careers outside the metropolitan centers of China in the 1980s with the Not-Not poetry group, He Xiaozhu (a poet and novelist of Miao heritage) and Jimu Langge (a Nuosu Yi poet and writer) have consistently brought unique creative tension to the poetics of the Chinese language. They currently live in Chengdu, Sichuan. D Dayton is a translator and occasional poet and writer whose work focuses on indigenous/minority literatures and the inherently translative modes present in these literatures. The three were on residency together at VSC thanks to a generous grant for Chinese poets and translators from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Jillian McManemin is a writer and performance artist. She received her BFA with a concentration in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2011. She has presented film and performance works at Anthology Film Archives, The CUE Foundation, Dixon Place, The Knockdown Center, and is currently working on a collection of novelettes, Interior Blindness.
Shelley Marlow is the author of the magic reality novel Two Augusts In a Row In a Row from Publication Studio Portland, 2015. Marlow’s essay on a visit with shamans in Siberia is reprinted online here: http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.com/2016/08/shelley-marlow.html. Photo by Alice O’Malley.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. A poetry student in University of Michigan's MFA program, his writings have been given homes by The Collagist, The Journal, Word Riot, and The Offing, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.tumblr.com and @Marlin_Poet.
Peter Turchi is co-editor of three anthologies and author of six books-- including most recently A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, and Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. He received Washington College’s Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He currently teaches nonfiction and fiction at the University of Houston, and fiction in Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers.
Sonya Larson's short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the American Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Poets & Writers, Audible.com, West Branch, Salamander, Del Sol Review, The Red Mountain Review, and The Hub. She has received honors and fellowships from Best American Short Stories 2015, the Vermont Studio Center, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She currently works as Assistant Director of the Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, hosted by GrubStreet in Boston, and is studying fiction in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Ryan Walsh grew up in West Virginia. He is author of the chapbooks Reckoner (Chickadee Chaps & Broads, 2015) and The Sinks (Midwest Writing Center Press, winner of the 2010 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest). Poems have appeared in Blackbird, Ecotone; FIELD; Forklift, Ohio; Green Mountains Review; Narrative, and elsewhere. He has worked at the Vermont Studio Center since 2011.
Laurie Macfee received an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Sierra Nevada College, and studied in the MFA Fine Arts program at University of South Florida. She received the Redfield Fellowship for Book Arts and is designer and past poetry editor of Sierra Nevada Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio, Blue Lyra Review, Big Bell, Terminus, Brushfire, Halcyon, and the anthology Change in the American West among others. She was Writing Program Coordinator in VSC's Staff-Artist Program in 2015-16 and continues on as Grants Coordinator and Interim Writing Program Director.
Matt Hart is the author of five books of poems: Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N BKS, 2013). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and Post Road, among others.
Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War and A Reunion of Ghosts. She teaches undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is a professor of English and the director of the MFA program in creative writing. She has received grants and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Bread Loaf, among others. She lives in Madison with her husband, the artist Don Friedlich. Judith Claire Mitchell's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Kara van de Graaf is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley University. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom, at www.lightboxpoetry.com.
A wandering artist writer who daily meets the world openly with interest and wonder, Wolf has published, exhibited art, lectured and teaches on subjects diverse (philosophy,art history,travel, yoga and astronomy). She is currently working on a collection of short stories, a novella and a play.
Jane Hirshfield’s most recent, eighth book of poetry is The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), appearing alongside a new book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). Previous books include Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011); After (HarperCollins, 2006), named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Financial Times (UK); and Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her earlier collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997), is considered a classic, as are the four books Hirshfield edited and cotranslated presenting the work of world poets of the past.
Hirshfield’s poems, described as “radiant and passionate” in The New York Times Book Review, “magnificent and distinctive” by The Irish Times, and “among the pantheon of the modern masters of simplicity” in the Washington Post, have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, Poetry, Harper’s, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the Donald Hall Jane Kenyon Award in American Poetry, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Jane Hirshfield's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Luce Fellowship recipients, Song Lin and Yu-Han Chao read from their work translating from Chinese to English during their May 2016 VSC residency.
Paulette Livers is the author of Cementville, a Novel (Counterpoint), Winner of Elle Magazine Lettres Prize, and finalist for Center for Fiction's Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and the Kentucky Literary Award. Please visit: www.PauletteLivers.com. Creative Director at Mighty Sword Studio—A Boutique Writing and Design Studio, where writers come to make good work, and publishers come to make beautiful books
Victor LaValle is the author of slapboxing with jesus, a collection of stories, and three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver. His most recent novel, The Devil in Silver, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2012. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He teaches creative writing in Columbia University's MFA program.
Dustin Parsons’ essays and stories have appeared in Seneca Review, Crab Orchard Review, Normal School, and Indiana Review amongst others. Recent honors for his writing include the American Literary Review fiction prize, The Laurel Review fiction prize, and grants in creative non-fiction from NYFA and the Ohio State Arts Council. He is associate professor of English at The State University of New York at Fredonia.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship and residencies from The Civitella di Ranieri and Lannan Foundations, she is also Senior Poetry Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. A deep interest in interdisciplinary approaches to writing, art, and ecological culture has led her to create LARB LAB, an online channel for experimentation through Los Angeles Review of Books. Her third book of poems, Rocket Fantastic is forthcoming. She is also at work on a memoir entitled The Year I Didn't Kill Myself. She teaches in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at UNC Chapel Hill. She lives and journeys all over. Gabrielle Calvocoressi's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (LSU 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (LSU 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook, Songs for the Carry-On (Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and the Miller Williams Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has taught most recently in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He works as a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.
Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as PrizeStories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas. Antonya Nelson's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Ah-reum Han received her MFA in Fiction from George Mason University, where she was the fiction fellow and won a few prizes. You can (slash will) find her work in Okey-Panky, Fugue, Blunderbuss, and Flyway, among others. She lives and loves in Virginia, where she masquerades as a proposal writer by day.
Tafisha A. Edwards is the author of THE BLOODLET, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Offing, PHANTOM, Bodega Magazine, Fjords Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and other print and online publications. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Jiminéz-Porter Writers’ House, a Cave Canem fellow, and a former educator with the American Poetry Museum. Tafisha's month-long residency at VSC was December 2015.
Noy Holland reads from her novel Bird during the December 2015 residency session at Vermont Studio Center.
Noy's collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two. Noy Holland's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Rikki Ducornet is the author of nine novels, including Netsuke, Gazelle, and The Fan Maker’s Inquisition; several collections of short fiction, including The One Marvelous Thing, The Word “Desire,” and The Complete Butcher’s Tales; two books of essays, The Deep Zoo and The Monstrous and the Marvelous, and five books of poetry, including The Cult of Seizure, Knife Notebook, and Wild Geraniums. Rikki Ducornet has twice been honored by the Lannan Foundation. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. She is also an accomplished and widely exhibited visual artist. Rikki Ducornet's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Learn more about Ducornet on her website: http://rikkiducornet.com/index.php
William Brewer was a James Merrill Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in February 2016. He shared six poems at one of the monthly resident readings.
William Brewer was born and raised in West Virginia. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, The Nation, A Public Space, and other journals. He has received fellowships from Columbia University, Poets & Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, and Stanford University, where he will be a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow (2016-2018).
For more information: http://williambrewer.net/#about
Visiting Writer Kwame Dawes shares his work with the VSC community in February 2016. Kwame was born in Ghana in 1962 and spent much of his childhood in Jamaica. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, Impossible Flying, Back of Mount Peace, Hope’s Hospice, Wheels, and Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems. Dawes’ novels include She’s Gone, and Bivouac, and his non-fiction collections include A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative, and Fugue and Other Writings. He is also the author of Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius, a study of the musician’s lyrics. Awards include an Emmy and Webby for Live Hope Love, an interactive website based on the Kwame Dawes Pulitzer Prize Center project HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica; the Forward Prize for Poetry; the Hollis Summers Prize for Poetry; a Pushcart Prize; and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, among others. Dawes currently serves as Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Kwame's visit was sponsored, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Simone Muench shares a selection of her poetry as a Visiting Writer at Vermont Studio Center in March 2016. Simone was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas and now lives in Chicago, IL. She is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing, which received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Lampblack & Ash, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Orange Crush; Disappearing Address, co-written with Philip Jenks; Wolf Centos; and Trace, which received the Black River Chapbook Prize from Black Lawrence Press. She is the recipient of the 2014 Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, a 2013 NEA Fellowship for Poetry award, and two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, among other awards. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago and serves as Professor of English at Lewis University, where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Simone Muench's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
http://simonemuench.com/
Three Chinese poets, Tang Siu Wa, Zang Li, and Yang Xiaobin read poems written at Vermont Studio Center during their month-long residency in January 2016, along with their paired translators Jennifer Feeley, Eleanor Goodman, and Canaan Morse, who share their translations of each piece. The group discussed the context of the work, and also held a conversation afterward about poetry and the nature of translation. The conversation/readings are in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The six were on residency together supported by a generous grant from the Luce Foundation. A link to the new fellowship application: http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/lit-the-literature-in-translation-program.
(photo––standing l to r: Yang Xiaobin, Canaan Morse, Jennifer Feeley, and Zang Li; sitting: Eleanor Goodman and Tang Siu Wa)
Tang Siu Wa 鄧小樺is a poet, prose writer, curator, and human rights activist from Hong Kong, as well as the founding editor of the literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres and co-founder of the House of Hong Kong Literature. She is the author of the poetry collections Unmoved Bottle and The Opposite of Sound, the essay collections A Motley of Banalities and As If Nothing Happened, and a collection of interviews Asking Directions from the People. She is also the editor of the collections Wait and See: Collected Works of Six New Hong Kong Writers, The Tomb of Film, and The Same Darkness Befalls Dawn: Hong Kong June Fourth Poetry. She teaches creative writing at various institutions in Hong Kong and writes columns and criticism for a variety of local media.
Jennifer Feeley holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and has taught at the University of Iowa. She has published poetry, translations of poetry and prose from Chinese into English, and articles on Chinese literature and cinema in various journals and anthologies, including FIELD, Epiphany, Tinfish, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Chinese Writers on Writing, among others. She is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi (Zephyr Press and MCCM Creations, 2016) and co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Zang Di 臧棣, a poet, critic, translator, and editor, was born in Beijing in 1964. Now a professor at Peking University, he has taught in the US, Japan, and Taiwan. Widely acknowledged as the leading poet-critic of his generation, Zang has published many books of poetry and edited several major anthologies of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry.
Eleanor Goodman’s book of translations, Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. The book was also shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize. Her first collection of poetry, Nine Dragon Island (Enclave/Zephyr, 2016), was a finalist for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize.
July 2015 resident and Giving Tuesday fellow Lania Knight talks about her writing process at VSC and reads part of her upcoming novel, Remnant.
Lania Knight's first book, Thee Cubic Feet, was a finalist for the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction. Her stories, essays, and interviews have been published in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, PANK, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rumpus, Jabberwock Review, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Quiddity and Literary Mama. She was a Resident Writing Fellow at Vermont Studio Center in July 2015, and she currently lives in the UK where she teaches as a Senior Lecturer at University of Gloucestershire. Read more about her at www.laniaknight.com.
VSC residents and 2015 Luce Foundation Fellows Yi Mimi and her translator Steve Bradbury read a selection of poems in the Mason House Library.
Ye Mimi is a Taiwanese poet and filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Department at Dong Hwa University and the MFA Film Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is the author of two volumes of poetry and has internationally exhibited several of her poetry films. Through collaging her words and images, she improvises a new landscape trying to erase the border between poetry and image making. Most recently, a bilingual chapbook of her poems was published by Anomalous Press under the title His Days Go by the Way Her Years.
Steve Bradbury is a long-standing member of American Literary Translators Association and a former professor of English who translates the work of contemporary poets writing in Chinese. His most recent translations (Ye Mimi’s His Days Go By the Way Her Years and Hsia Yü’s Salsa) were short-listed for (respectively) the 2014 Best Translated Book Award and 2015 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. He lives in Ft. White, Florida.
ZZ Packer shares a short story during a Resident Reading at Vermont Studio Center. She was a resident for the month of August, 2015.
ZZ received her BA from Yale University in English Literature, an MA from Johns Hopkins and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the highly acclaimed “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories,” which was a National Book Award 5 Under 35 Winner and a New York Times notable book. Her new novel, “The Thousands,” is forthcoming in 2016. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, Zoetrope, and Harpers, among many others, and her non-fiction in the New York Times Magazine and also the Book Review, Smithsonian Magazine, The Oxford American, and Salon.com, to name but a few. Currently at MIT, ZZ has taught at San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts, University of Houston, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and University of Texas. She was the Distinguished Visiting Lurie Chair at San Jose State University, Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and Zale Distinguished Lecturer at Tulane. Residencies include MacDowell Colony, Ucross, and Villa Montalvo, and she has been awarded the Radcliffe Institute Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellowship at Harvard, American Academy in Berlin Prize, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.
Major Jackson is an American poet, professor and the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Hoops (W.W. Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. He is also a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell and currently serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.
Diana Goetsch speaks in an interview about her current work and practice while at Vermont Studio Center, followed by her reading four poems as part of the Resident Reading night on September 6, 2015. The discussion/introduction was held with Laurie Macfee, Writing Coordinator at VSC, in the Mason House Library a couple days after the evening reading in the Lowe Lecture Hall in Johnson, VT.
Diana Goetsch (formerly Douglas Goetsch) is the author of Nameless Boy, The Job of Being Everybody and several other volumes of poems. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and numerous other journals and anthologies. Among her honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Donald Murray Prize.
Diana is an experienced and innovative writing teacher who has taught at colleges, conferences and MFA programs, in addition to teaching privately—one-on-one, and group workshops in her New York City apartment. She is also the editor of Jane Street Press, a unique, zero-profit poetry press she founded in 2001.
Please visit her website for further information: http://dianagoetsch.com/
Photograph by Laurie Macfee 2015, VSC
In June, VSC was lucky to have two additional writers visit on residency for a week, actor/writer/activist Alan Cumming and poet/musician/editor Matt Hart. They joined a wickedly talented group to conclude a great night’s resident reading on June 23, 2015. Alan shared an essay he worked on while VSC and Matt read a series of recent poems.
Alan Cumming is a Tony and Olivier award winning theatre actor (Cabaret, Hamlet, Threepenny Opera, Design for Living, Macbeth, etc), National Board of Review winner and Independent Spirit Award nominated film actor (Goldeneye, Emma, X2:X Men United, The Anniversary Party, etc), and a Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG award nominated television actor (Sex and the City, the L Word, The Good Wife, etc), as well as an author and activist. Alan trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In addition, he is an Independent Spirit award-winning producer and National Board of Review winning director, has sung at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the London Palladium and the Sydney Opera House, and received humanitarian awards from AMFAR, Human Rights Campaign, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, GLAAD and the Trevor Project, to name but a few.
Matt Hart is the author of several books of poems, including Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012) and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY Magazine, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL.
A. H. Jerriod Avant was the Callaloo Fellow in residency at Vermont Studio Center in June 2015. This recording blends two readings he did during his stay at VSC: the first, in the Mason House library, serves as a quiet introduction or segue into his second public reading in the Lecture Hall.
Jerriod was born in Longtown, MS. A graduate of Jackson State University, he has earned M.FA. degrees from Spalding University and New York University, where he was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. An alumnus of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Brown University, his poems have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Boston Review, Pinwheel, Louisville Review, The Rumpus, and other journals. Jerriod is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations, finalist for the 2015 Mississippi Review Prize, recipient of the Joseph F. McCrindle Online Editorial Fellowship at Poets & Writers, a Vermont Studio Center residency and a 2015 -2016 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship.
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997) and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). In 2002, the novel Doctor Sleep was adapted as a film, Close Your Eyes, starring Goran Visnjic, Paddy Considine, and Shirley Henderson. Forty Words For Fear, an album of songs co-written by Bell and Wyn Cooper and inspired by the novel Anything Goes,was released by Gaff Music in 2003; other performers include Don Dixon, Jim Brock, Mitch Easter and Chris Frank.
Bell's eighth novel, All Soul's Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That The Builder Refused, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture A Biography was published by Pantheon in 2007. Devil's Dream, a novel based on the career of Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was published by Pantheon in 2009. Bell's latest novel, The Color of Night, appeared from Vintage Contemporaries in April 2011.
Nandi Comer gave a public reading as the culmination of her year-long residency as a staff artist and Writing Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center. Nandi received a joint MFA/MA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, and Callaloo. She is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in A Beautiful House: Writers-in-Residence on Teaching (Wayne State University Press, 2014), Detroit Anthology (Rust Belt Chic Press, 2014), Another and Another: An Anthology From the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press, 2012), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Sycamore Review.
Reading with Nandi is Maria Robinson, the Marketing and Communications Manager at the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and has done graduate work at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in PANK, the Bellevue Literary Review, the cream city review, Spork, and Pindeldyboz among others.
Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. Jean Valentine's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Edward Hirsch has published eight collections of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; his second, Wild Gratitude (1986) won the award in 1987. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received a MacArthur “genius” award in 1997. In addition to his poetry work he is also known for running the “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post. To read more about him please visit: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edward-hirsch
Edward Hirsch has published eight collections of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; his second, Wild Gratitude (1986) won the award in 1987. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received a MacArthur “genius” award in 1997. In addition to his poetry work he is also known for running the “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post. To read more about him please visit: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edward-hirsch
Brian Teare has published four full-length books: The Room Where I was Born, Sight Map, The Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses. He has also published seven chapbooks: Pilgrim, Transcendental Grammar Crown, Paradise Was Typeset, Helplessness, Black Sun Crown, and Sore Eros. Teare is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society. He is currently an assistant professor at Temple University in Philadelphia where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Please visit his website for more information: http://www.brianteare.net/about
Phillip Lopate is the author of several collections of essays, novels, novellas, poetry collections, scholarly works, biography, and writings on the craft of nonfiction and teaching. His essays, fiction, poetry, film, and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories (1974), The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia. Teeth was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award and Kingdom Animalia won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Girmay is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and she also teaches poetry in Drew University's low-residency MFA program. Aracelis Girmay's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
Stephen Narain (January/February 2015) shares the opening of his novel-in-progress. Stephen is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he won the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. In 2012, he was selected by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest for the festival's New Talent Showcase, spotlighting the best emerging Caribbean writers. His stories and essays have appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Small Axe: A Platform for Caribbean Criticism.
Leah Hampton is a fiction writer from North Carolina who attended VSC in December 2014. Here, she reads from the opening scene of "Dollywood," a short story about a woman hoping for a chance to talk to Dolly Parton.
Sio San Un is a poet and writer native to Macau. She graduated from Peking University and the University of Toronto and has won several writing prizes, including the New Star’s People’s Literature Prize of Poetry and the Macao Literature Prize. Her works can be found in journals throughout Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China.
Jeremy Tiang is a translator located in Brooklyn, NY. He has translated various writers, including You Jin, Su Wei-chen and Wong Yoon Wah. His awards and grants include the PEN/ Heim Translation Grant (2013), a National Arts Council Singapore Arts Creation Fund Grant (2012)and a SPH-NAC Golden Point Award (2009).
Patrick Rosal is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Boneshepherds (2011), which was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets; My American Kundiman (2006); Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003); and Brooklyn Antediluvian (forthcoming in 2016).
His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including The New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Grantland, Brevity, The Beacon Best, and The Best American Poetry. His awards include the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken, for his chapbook Uncommon Denominators, and a 2009 a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines.
Patrick Rosal is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program. Learn more at www.patrickrosal.com
December 2014 resident, Morgan Willis, is a novelist, editor, activist and strategic consultant who currently resides in Detroit, Michigan. Listen to Morgan read from a current work in progress, "Politics from Nowhere."
Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two story collections and a novel, THREATS, a nominee for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
Brian Holton is a poet & prize-winning translator from Scotland. He has published numerous translations, including Jade Ladder: A Bloodaxe Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (UK 2012) and several volumes of the work of poet Yang Lian (Lee Valley Poems (UK 2009), Pisces Rising (UK 2008), Sailor’s Home (UK, 2005), Concentric Circles (UK 2005), and Notes of a Blissful Ghost: Selected Poems (Hong Kong 2002)). At Vermont Studio Center, he worked on a translation of a new collection by Yang Lian. Here he reads from his translation of “Peking Opera Lesson,” completed during his residency.
Hear October 2014 resident Sharon Gelman reads from the opening of her novel (currently titled Exile). Gelman is an essayist, author, speechwriter, and activist who is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson. Her work has appeared in Tutu, The Authorized Portrait (HarperCollins, 2011), Essence.com (December 2010), and Tutu as I Knew Him. (Umuzi-Random House, 2006).
Alice Notley is the author of more than twenty books of poetry including The Descent of Alette and Mysteries of Small Houses. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the L.A. Times Book Award for Poetry. In 2001, she received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award. Born in Arizona, Notley grew up in California. She was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the New York school of poetry.
Yi Sha was born in 1966 in Chengdu, and moved with his family at the age of two to the central Chinese city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. He published his first poems while still at school, studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University, and became a noted figure among China’s university student poets. He has worked on literary magazines, as a TV presenter and independent publisher, and is now an assistant professor at the Xi’an International Studies University.
Martin Winter is a translator and poet from Vienna, Austria. He has translated several Chinese poets . His translations have appeared in the Poetry International Festival, South China Morning Post, the Taipei Times and Poetry Sky.
Their joint residency in October 2014 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.
Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She lives on Cape Cod, where she, in the eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc.
Our fifth Cave Canem Fellow, Makalani Bandele, reads from his invented form, the etude. Bandele's work appears or is forthcoming in The New Sound, Barely South Review, and Red Holler: Contemporary Appalachian Literature.
Michael Hofmann (b. 1957) is a German-born poet and translator. He has published six books of poetry: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona (1993), Approximately Nowhere (1999), and Selected Poems (2009). With James Lasdun, he edited the influential anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994). A selection of his criticism, Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, was published in 2002. He has edited and introduced short selections of the poems of Robert Lowell (2001) and John Berryman (2003), and has edited the anthology Twentieth Century German Poetry (2006).
Hofmann has alsotranslated some seventy books from the German, mainly novels, including works by Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and Wim Wenders. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books and Poetry (Chicago).
For his poetry he has won a Cholmondeley Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and an English Arts Council grant; for his translations the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize, the Weidenfeld Oxford Translation Prize (twice), and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Deutsche Akademie der Künste.
He received his BA (1979) and MA (1984) in English from Cambridge University. He teaches at the University of Florida and He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the New School University, and Barnard College, Columbia University.
Peter Stamm a Swiss novelist, short-story writer, and radio dramatist joined German-born poet and translator, Michael Hofmann, to present to the VSC community about their experiences with literary translation. Stamm worked as an accountant for nearly a decade before becoming a writer. His sparse writing style has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann.
Michael Hofmann has translated some seventy books from German, mainly novels, including works by Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and Wim Wenders. Michael Hofmann also has published six books of poetry and with James Lasdun, he edited the influential anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994).
Ross Gay's books of poetry are Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and the forthcoming Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. He is also co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens. He is an editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue, in addition to being an editor with the online sports magazine, Some Call It Ballin'. He was a 2013 Guggenheim fellow.
Rose Bunch is a novelist and essayist from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her work appeared in Tin House, The Greensboro Review and New Letters. Rose Bunch joined us during September 2014. Here she reads from her story "Sustainability".
Toby Alman is a poet from Chicago and author of two poetry chapbooks, Asides (Furniture Press Books) and Life of Richard (Damask Press). He stopped by to read from his versed play that he worked on while at VSC.
Rick Moody is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and, most recently, a collection of essays on music. He is finishing a new novel. He also writes music criticism for Salon and The Rumpus.
Antonya Nelson is the author of seven short story collections, including FUNNY ONCE (Bloomsbury, 2014), and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell). Work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.
Srikanth Reddy grew up in Chicago. He is the author of two books of poetry, Facts for Visitors and Voyager, both published by the University of California Press. A scholarly study, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Reddy earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa and a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University, and he has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Mellon Foundation. Hi is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Poet Zhu Zhu and Tranlator Dong Li were residents in June 2014, part of the Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship program supporting Chinese poets and translators.
DIANA WHITNEY is a writer, yoga instructor, and mother of two in Brattleboro, Vermont. In February 2009, she saw light at the mouth of The Baby Cave and started writing Spilt Milk, an irreverent, advice-free parenting column that was syndicated in several Vermont newspapers.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts, and three novels: The Subject Steve, Home Land and The Ask. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, N+1, The Quarterly, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of ZOOLOGIES (Milkweed Editions, 2014); Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; three additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005), and Rope (Penguin, 2009); and three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed, Credo Series). She has recently completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit. Her poems and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Georgia Review, Orion, Isotope, Southwestern American Literature, Parthenon West, Sierra, Gnosis, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is the former Director of the University of Arizona Poetry (1990-2002), the current Director of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and also serves as Chairperson of the Board of Directors for Orion magazine.
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Wind in a Box (2006); Hip Logic (2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received many honors and awards, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, seven Best American Poetry selections, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. He is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which in 2009 won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is also the editor of three Harper Perennial philosophy books entitled, Why We Fight, Why We Need Love, and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter. He has written for NPR and for newspapers including, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. He lives in New York City where he lectures at the School of Visual Arts, and is involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities program (REaCH) for young adults living in under-served communities. His books have been translated into nine languages.
Emmanuel Moses was born in Casablanca and spent his early childhood in France. He lived in Israel from the ages of ten to eighteen, then returned to Paris, where he still lives. He is the author of six novels and eight collections of poems, most recently L’Animal (Flammarion, 2010). He is a translator of contemporary Hebrew fiction and poetry, notably of Yehuda Amichai. He also translates from German as well as English.
Marilyn Hacker lives in New York and Paris. She is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names (W. W. Norton, 2009). For her own poetry, she has been awarded the Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets' Prize, a National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her ten volumes of translations include Emmanuel Moses' He and I; Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen; and Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Nettles.
Dawes has published fifteen collections of poetry. His most recent titles include Back of Mount Peace (2009); Hope's Hospice (2009); Wisteria, finalist for the Patterson Memorial Prize; Impossible Flying (2007); and Gomer's Song (2007). Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994) was the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in the UK. Other poetry collections include Resisting the Anomie (Goose Lane, 1995); Prophets (Peepal Tree, 1995); Jacko Jacobus, (Peepal Tree, 1996); and Requiem, (Peepal Tree. 1996), a suite of poems inspired by the illustrations of African American artist, Tom Feelings in his landmark book The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo; and Shook Foil (Peepal Tree, 1998), a collection of reggae-inspired poems. His book, Midland, was awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by the Ohio University Press (2001). In 2001, Dawes was a winner of a Pushcart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001 for his long poem, "Inheritance."
David Wolf Budbill is an American poet, and playwright. He is the author of eight books of poems, eight plays, a novel, a collection of short stories, a picture book for children, and dozens of essays, introductions, speeches, and book reviews.
Matt Hart is the author of five books of poems, Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N Books, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013), as well as several chapbooks. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including The Academy of American Poets online, The American Reader, Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and Post Road, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL.
Simone Muench is the author of five poetry books including the forthcoming Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). She is a recipient of a 2013 NEA fellowship as well as residency fellowships from Yaddo, Artsmith, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. She serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Her website is simone@simonemuench.com
Rikki Ducornet is the author of seven novels including The Fan maker's Inquisition, a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and The Jade Cabinet, finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She has received Fellowships from The Lannan Foundation and the Bunting Institute,among others, and in 2004, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her third collection of short fictions will be out this year with the Dalkey Archive; in May 2007, she had a one woman show of her paintings at the Pierre Menrad Gallery in Cambridge, Mass. She is widely published and exhibited abroad.
Partridge Boswell read before Visiting Writer Michael Dickman on 3/24.
Partridge Boswell’s first book of poems, Some Far Country, received the 2013 Grolier Discovery Award. “Such desperate beauty in these poems,” remarks Marie Howe, “such rendered and willed surviving. Read this book if you want to remember what poetry can do to us, how it can find words for what can’t be said and shake us by our shoulders until we feel achingly alive again.” A longtime arts advocate, Boswell has served at the vanguard of cultural activities in northern New England as the director of several regional performing arts organizations. Co-founder of Bookstock: The Green Mountain Festival of Words and managing editor of Harbor Mountain Press based in White River Junction, he lives with his family in Woodstock, Vermont. His poems have been featured recently in such publications as The American Poetry Review, Slice and The Literary Review.
Michael Dickman is the author of The End of the West, and Flies, both published by Copper Canyon Press. He co-wrote 50 American Plays, also published by Copper Canyon. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Resident composer and musician Bill Frisell performed at the Red Mill, showcasing new compositions he'd created while at VSC. Born in Baltimore, Bill Frisell played clarinet throughout his childhood in Denver, Colorado. His interest in guitar began with his exposure to pop music on the radio. Soon, the Chicago Blues became a passion through the work of Otis Rush, B.B. King, Paul Butterfield and Buddy Guy. In high school, he played in bands covering pop and soul classics, James Brown and other dance material. Later, Bill studied music at the University of Northern Colorado before attending Berklee College of Music in Boston where he studied with John Damian, Herb Pomeroy and Michael Gibbs. In 1978, Frisell moved for a year to Belgium where he concentrated on writing music. In this period, he toured with Michael Gibbs and first recorded with German bassist Eberhard Weber. Bill moved to the New York City area in 1979 and stayed until 1989. He now lives in Seattle.
Photo by Monica Frisell.
Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Her Inferno (A poet's novel) (2010), tells the story of that decision, and was described by John Ashbery as “Zingingly funny and melancholy.” Eileen’s books of poetry include Not Me, School of Fish, Skies, Maxfield Parrish and Sorry,Tree. Chelsea Girls (1994) was her first fiction book, followed by Cool for You, a nonfiction novel (2000). In San Diego she wrote the libretto for the opera Hell (composed by Michael Webster). She directed the writing program at the University of California at San Diego for five years, returning to New York in 2007. Eileen's articles and columns have appeared in Art Forum, Art in America, Book Forum, Parkett, the Harriet blog, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her essays were collected in The Importance of Being Iceland (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writers grant. In 2010, the Poetry Society of American awarded Myles the Shelley Memorial Award.
Catherine Despont was a writing resident in January 2014. Here she discusses the frozen Gihon river, and what it means for her writing process.
Howard Norman is the author of three novels including The Museum Guard. His first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were finalists for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Prize, The New England Bookseller's Association Award, 3 fellowships from the NEA, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His translations of Inuit folktales have earned him two Translation Center Awards from Columbia University. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, and lives in VT and Washington, D.C.
Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards , and was collected in The Bostons, which won the PEN/Bingham award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Anna Coe was a writing resident at the Vermont Studio Center in December 2013. Here, she discusses the role of memory in her writing.
Yannick Murphy is the author of the novels, THE CALL, SIGNED, MATA HARI, HERE THEY COME, and THE SEA OF TREES. Her story collections include STORIES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE and IN A BEAR'S EYE. Her children's books include THE COLD WATER WITCH, BABY POLAR, and AHWOOOOOOOO!. She is the recipient of various awards including a Whiting Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts award, a Chesterfield Screenwriting award and her story IN A BEAR'S EYE was recently published in the 2007 O'Henry Prize Stories.
Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently the novel Five Skies. His short stories have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Tin House, The New Yorker, and other journals. It has been collected in The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Award Series, and The Pushcart Prize Annual. He is Regent's Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Since1983, Yu Xinqiao has written many books of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, most of them unpublished. He is also a painter. In addition to art creation, he has focused on supporting the arts and has curated exhibitions of art, music, film, and drama.
Brian Holton is an award-winning translator and poet. He translates Chinese works into English and Scots, and has published more than a dozen books of poetry in translation.
Their joint residency in November 2013 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.
Noy Holland’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2),What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf.) She has published work in Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, New York Tyrant, and Post Road, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at FC2.
Susan Mitchell is the author of three books of poems, most recently Erotikon and Rapture which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. She has been honored with grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, and The New Republic and have appeared in several volumes of the Best American Poetry series and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Mitchell holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its MFA Writing Program.
Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently the novel Five Skies. His short stories have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Tin House, The New Yorker, and other journals. It has been collected in The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Award Series, and The Pushcart Prize Annual. He is Regent's Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the HumanForm (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics CirlcleAward and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children's book, TheLittle General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by ElizabethZechel, was published byTin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, will be published byMcSweeney's in 2010. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.
McNair is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Creative Writers, and in 2006 a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000, fifty of which were awarded across the arts to a selection of "America's finest living artists." Other honors include the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry (for Fire); the Devins Award for poetry; the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Theodore Roethke prize from Poetry Northwest; the Pushcart Prize, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal (also awarded to Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, et. al.) for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters." He has received three honorary degrees for literary distinction.
A two-time recipient of Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, Wesley McNair has read his poetry at the Library of Congress and a wide range of colleges and universities. A television series aired over affiliates of PBS on Robert Frost for which he wrote the scripts received an Emmy Award. Featured on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs) and 14 times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, his work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over sixty anthologies and textbooks. He has served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
A reading celebrating the publication of From Sorrow’s Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth, edited by Shaun T. Griffin. An acclaimed American poet and critic, Hayden Carruth lived for many years along the Foote Brook in Johnson and wrote some of his most lasting and significant poems about the rural environment and people of northern Vermont. This book launch features readings and reflections by:
Shaun T. Griffin Geof Hewitt David Budbill Baron Wormser Rose Marie Carruth
Melissa Bank is the author of two story collections The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. She received the Nelson Algren Award for short fiction from the Chicago Tribune and holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. Her work has been translated into 33 languages.
Lu De’an, a native of Fujian province, was born in 1960. His initial interest in poetry was sparked by the emergence of the so-called “obscure” poets at the end of the 1970s, and his friendship with Shu Ting, another Fukienese who is probably one of the most extraordinary Chinese poets of the second half of the twentieth century, but he trained as a commercial artist, and has learned much from modernist painting as a poet. He was associated with the Nanjing-based ‘Them’ [Tamen] group, and published frequently in its unofficial journal which was launched in 1985. ‘Nude’, a poem from the Them Decade Anthology was published in 1991.
Lu’s published individual collections include, A Place to Dwell (2011), Rocks (2000), North of South [Nanfang yi bei], Paper Serpent [Zhi she] and Another Half of Life [Ling yiban shengming]. Important in terms of his life experience was the time he spent in New York between the years 1991 and 1994 (New York serves a faint back-drop to his poem ‘As Told to the Poet: 1’). To this day, he continues to pursue a career as a poet and a painter, and currently works freelance.
Mindy Zhang is a Chinese poet and translator. She is the main editor of two books of Chinese poetry translations, forthcoming on Tupelo Press: The Book of Cranes: The Poetry of Zang Di; and New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry 1990-2012.
Their joint residency in October 2013 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.
A 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Peter Cole is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), and Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon). With Adina Hoffman, he is also the author of a book of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken/Nextbook). Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association Brody Medal for Jewish Book of the Year, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman writes often of the Middle East, approaching it from unusual angles and shedding light on overlooked dimensions of the place, its people, and their cultures. Her books include House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century. The latter was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the best biographies of the year by Booklist. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the Jewish book of 2011. A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she is one of the inaugural (2013) winners of the Windham-Campbell Literary Prizes, administered by the Beinecke Library.
A 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Peter Cole is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), and Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon). With Adina Hoffman, he is also the author of a book of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken/Nextbook). Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association Brody Medal for Jewish Book of the Year, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Annick Smith is author of the memoir Homestead, as well as a collection of essays, In This We Are Native, and a history of the tallgrass prairies, Big Bluestem. She was co-editor with William Kittredge of the Montana anthology, The Last Best Place, and co-editor with Susan O’Connor of The Wide Open: Prose Poems and Photographs of the Prairie. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many magazines and journals including Story, Outside, Orion, Audubon, Travel & Leisure, Triquarterly, and the NY Times Traveler. Smith’s film credits include being executive producer of the feature HEARTLAND and co-producer of A River Runs Through it. Her documentary credits include a public television series The Real People, for KSPS-TV, Spokane, about seven tribes in the Inland Northwest, as well as a portrait of poet Richard Hugo, Kicking The Loose Gravel Home. Smith was a founding member of the Sundance Film Institute, has won numerous literary and film awards, and directed the Yellow Bay Writers Workshop for eleven years. She has taught creative writing at the University of Montana as well as other writing workshops and conferences. She has lived in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley since 1971, raised a family there, and has been an ardent voice for conservation and protection of the environment.
Galway Kinnell is an American poet. For his 1982 Selected Poems he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993 he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.
Rebecca Brown is the author of ten books, including The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, and Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, Danish and Norwegian and widely anthologized. She is Creative Director of Literature at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington, and teaches in the MFA program at Goddard College in Vermont. She lives in Seattle.
Born in Louisiana, Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including: Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, which received the 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award, Hat On a Pond, Voyages in English, Our Master Plan, which received a Phi Beta Kappa Award Finalist Citation, Blue for the Plough, The Book of Knowledge, All You Have in Common, The 8-Step Grapevine, and Blood, Hook & Eye. You Good Thing is forthcoming in April 2013. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, is a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. Wier is a former Director and on the permanent faculty of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . She co-founded and co-directs the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action and the annual Juniper Summer Writing Institute. She is a member of the arts and literary community center Flying Object in Hadley, Massachusetts. Recent poems can be found in The Nation, jubilat, not nostrums, Conduit, Make, American Poetry Review, skein, Fou, Maggy, Boston Review, Green Mountain Review, Salt River Review. With Emily Pettit and Guy Pettit she publishes and edits chapbooks, books and broadsides for Factory Hollow Press.
Adam Davis was the recipient of the 2013 Kay Evans Fellowship at VSC.
Fanny Howe has written numerous books of poetry including Gone, (University of California Press, 2003), Selected Poems (UC Press, 2000), On the Ground (Graywolf Press, 2004), and The Lyrics (Graywolf, 2007). She has also written novels, five of them collected in one volume called Radical Love. At seventeen Howe left her home in Boston for California and has since spent her life there and in England, Ireland, and Massachusetts. In recent years she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written two collections of essays, The Wedding Dress (UC Press, 2003) and The Winter Sun (Graywolf, 2009). Howe has three grown children and six little grandchildren; she currently lives on Martha’s Vineyard.
Poet Song Huiyuan reads in Chinese with translator Meifu Wang. Their joint residency in September 2013 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.
Stephen Dunn is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, including Here and Now, which will be published by Norton in May, 2011. His Different Hours was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Among his many other awards are The Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time these days in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.
Srikanth Reddy grew up in Chicago. He is the author of two books of poetry, Facts for Visitors and Voyager, both published by the University of California Press. A scholarly study, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Reddy earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa and a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University, and he has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Mellon Foundation. Hi is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Michael Steinberg is founding editor of the literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. His most recent books include Still Pitching, winner of the 2003 Foreword Magazine /Independent Press Memoir of the Year; Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs From Michigan (2001); The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (currently in its fifth edition); and Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching (1997)--the latter two with Robert Root Jr. His shorter works have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. In addition, Steinberg has been a guest writer at many colleges and universities, as well as at several national and international writers’ conferences--including the Prague Summer Program, the Paris Writers’ Conference, The Kachemak Bay/Alaska Writers’ Conference, and the Geneva Writers’ Conference, among others. He's writer-in-residence at the Solstice/Pine Manor College low-residency MFA program in Boston. He and his wife Carole, a visual artist, divide their time between Lansing and Northport, Michigan.
Noy Holland’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2),What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf.) She has published work in Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, New York Tyrant, and Post Road, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at FC2.
Evie Shockley is the author of two poetry collections, the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011) and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (2001). Also a scholar, she has written a critical study entitled Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (forthcoming, University of Iowa Press). Since 2007, she has co-edited the journal jubilat. Shockley teaches African American literature and creative writing (poetry) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Michael Martone's most recent books are Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, were all published recently. With Robin Hemley, he edited Extreme Fiction. With Lex Williford, he edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, and other magazines. His awards include two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation; his stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. He is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.
Brian Kiteley has published three novels, The River Gods, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, and Still Life with Insects. He has also written two books of fiction exercises, The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough. Kiteley has received Guggenheim, Whiting, and NEA fellowships, and had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Millay, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is director of creative writing at the University of Denver.
Rick Moody is the author of four novels (GARDEN STATE, THE ICE STORM, PURPLE AMERICA, and THE DIVINERS), three collections of stories, and a memoir (THE BLACK VEIL). He's at work on a new novel and a collection of essays on music.
Waldman has written more than 40 books, including the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, the innovative Marriage: A Sentence; and the meditative Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble. Her most recent is Manatee Humanity (2009), a hybrid-poem that explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore and encounters, dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual. Outrider, a collection of poems, essays, and interviews, is a look at what poetry and the role of the poet can be. Waldman is cofounder, with Allen Ginsberg, of the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Recipient of many awards, she is the Artistic Director for Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and teaches in New England College’s MFA program.
Tim Seibles is the author of several poetry collections including, Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. He was the poet-in-residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania for the spring semester of 2010. Most recently, his poems were featured in the Cortland Review and Ploughshares. His work was also published in the newly released anthologies, Black Nature and Seriously Funny. His next collection, Fast Animal, will be released from Cleveland State University Press in spring 2011. He lives in Virginia where he teaches writing at Old Dominion University. He is also visiting faculty for the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine.
On May 27, 1941, Simon J. Ortiz was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He attended Fort Lewis College and the University of New Mexico for undergraduate studies. He received his MFA as an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa's Writer's School in 1969.
His books of poetry include: Telling and Showing Her: The Earth, The Land (Just Buffalo Literary Center, 1995); After and Before the Lightning (1994); Woven Stone (1992); From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America (1981), for which he received a Pushcart Prize; A Good Journey (1977); Going for the Rain (1976); and Naked in the Wind (1971).
He has also published children's books, memoirs, non-fiction, and short stories, and served as editor of various books and anthologies.
Ortiz is a recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, the New Mexico Humanities Council Humanitarian Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and was an Honored Poet at the 1981 White House Salute to Poetry. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Returning the Gift Festival of Native Writers.
Ortiz lives in the Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, where he was lieutenant governor and a consulting editor of the Pueblo of Acoma Press. He has taught writing and Native American literature at various institutions, and currently teaches at the University of Toronto.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the graduate writing program at Otis College of Art and Design (in Los Angeles).
Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.
His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Since then, he has published several books of poems, most recently Special Orders (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Lay Back the Darkness (2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); and The Night Parade (1989).
He is also the author of the prose volumes The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt, 2002), Responsive Reading (1999), and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), which the poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, he published Poet's Choice (Harcourt, 2007), which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay-letters running in the Washington Post Book World.
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of twenty-three novels, collections of short stories, and non-fiction works. Delbanco's work has received numerous awards and honors including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a professor in the department of language and literature at Bennington College from 1966-85 and is currently the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and Chair of the Hopwood Committee. His most recent non-fiction book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011.
Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002) which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry. At Emory University she is Professor of English and holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of a dozen collections of poems, including ESSAYS ON DEPARTURE (Carcanet, 2006), DESESPERANTO, (Norton, 2003) and WINTER NUMBERS which received the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. NAMES will be published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2009. She has also published ten collections of translations from the French, including Marie Etienne's KING OF A HUNDRED HORSEMEN (Farrar Strauss and Giroux 2008) which received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize and the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008.
Jody Gladding's Rooms and Their Airs was published by Milkweed Editions (2009). Her collection Stone Crop appeared in the Yale Younger Poets Series, and recent poems have appeared in Poetry, ecopoetics, and Orion, among other journals. She also translates French and has produced some 20 translations for Archipelago Books, Columbia Univ. Press, Princeton Univ. Press, and other publishers. Gladding has taught at Cornell Univ., was Resident Poet at the Frost Place, has received a Whiting Writers Award, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She lives in East Calais, Vermont.
Jane Hirshfield is the author six poetry collections, most recently After (HarperCollins), named a best book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times. Other honors include major fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her seventh poetry collection will be published by Knopf in August, 2011. Hirshfield is also the author of a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and three equally classic books collecting the work of women poets of the past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the TLS, The New Republic, Poetry, and five editions of The Best American Poems.
Carl Phillips is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low (FSG, 2009) and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (FSG, 2007). His awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was named a Chancellor in 2006. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carol Moldaw is the author of four books of poetry including Through the Window (La Almeda Press, 2001), Chalkmarks on Stone, and Taken From the River. Her work has appeared widely in such places as Paris Review, Conjunctions, Partisan Review, The Three Penny Review, Triquarterly, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. She has taught at New York University, Boston University and the Naropa Institute. She lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Antonya Nelson is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. Her first story collection, The Expendables, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990. She is the author of four other short story collections, including Some Fun (Scribner's 2006), and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell). She lives in New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado.
Born in the Mojave Desert of California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia. His first college degree was in geology, and earth science continues to inform his writing. His book A Faithful Existence is a lyrical exploration of what it might mean to be faithful-in acts of translation, scientific and spiritual inquiry, friendship, and poetry. His new book Eye Against Eye takes place as five long poems. He has translated numerous books including, with Kent Johnson, The Night by Jaime Saenz. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award for Writers, the Howard Foundation Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and two Gertrude Stein Awards, Gander teaches at Brown University.
Donald Revell is a Professor of English at the University of Utah. Twice the winner of the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been granted fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell lives in the desert south of Las Vegas with his wife, poet, Claudia Keelan.
Alan Cheuse is the author of the novels The Bohemians (1982), The Grandmother's Club (1986), The Light Possessed (1990), and To Catch the Lightning (2008) plus three collections of short fiction, Candace and Other Stories (1980), The Tennessee Waltz (1991), and Lost and Old Rivers (1998), and a pair of novellas The Fires (2007), as well as the nonfiction work Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey (1987). As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." A Trance After Breakfast, his collected travel essays, appeared last summer. His new novel, Song of Slaves in the Desert, will come out in the spring of 2011.
Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945, a largely Polish city that became a part of the Soviet Ukraine shortly after his birth. A major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Zagajewski is today one of the most well-known and highly regarded contemporary Polish poets in Europe and the United States. Zagajewski's most recent books in English are Eternal Enemies (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008) and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and Solidarity, Solitude: Essays. When, after September 11, The New Yorker published his poem, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," on its back page—a rare departure from the cartoons and parodies that usually occupy that space—it resonated with many readers. He now spends part of the year in Krakow, the city he lived in during the 1960s and '70s; and he teaches in Chicago.