Vermont Studio Center

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.