Vermont Studio Center

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.