Vermont Studio Center

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.