Vermont Studio Center

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.