Vermont Studio Center

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.