Vermont Studio Center

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship and residencies from The Civitella di Ranieri and Lannan Foundations, she is also Senior Poetry Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. A deep interest in interdisciplinary approaches to writing, art, and ecological culture has led her to create LARB LAB, an online channel for experimentation through Los Angeles Review of Books. Her third book of poems, Rocket Fantastic is forthcoming. She is also at work on a memoir entitled The Year I Didn't Kill Myself. She teaches in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at UNC Chapel Hill. She lives and journeys all over. Gabrielle Calvocoressi's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (LSU 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (LSU 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook, Songs for the Carry-On (Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and the Miller Williams Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has taught most recently in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He works as a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as PrizeStories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas. Antonya Nelson's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Ah-reum Han received her MFA in Fiction from George Mason University, where she was the fiction fellow and won a few prizes. You can (slash will) find her work in Okey-Panky, Fugue, Blunderbuss, and Flyway, among others. She lives and loves in Virginia, where she masquerades as a proposal writer by day.

Tafisha A. Edwards is the author of THE BLOODLET, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Offing, PHANTOM, Bodega Magazine, Fjords Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and other print and online publications. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Jiminéz-Porter Writers’ House, a Cave Canem fellow, and a former educator with the American Poetry Museum. Tafisha's month-long residency at VSC was December 2015.

Noy Holland reads from her novel Bird during the December 2015 residency session at Vermont Studio Center.

Noy'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, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, 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. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two. Noy Holland's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Rikki Ducornet is the author of nine novels, including Netsuke, Gazelle, and The Fan Maker’s Inquisition; several collections of short fiction, including The One Marvelous Thing, The Word “Desire,” and The Complete Butcher’s Tales; two books of essays, The Deep Zoo and The Monstrous and the Marvelous, and five books of poetry, including The Cult of Seizure, Knife Notebook, and Wild Geraniums. Rikki Ducornet has twice been honored by the Lannan Foundation. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. She is also an accomplished and widely exhibited visual artist. Rikki Ducornet's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Learn more about Ducornet on her website: http://rikkiducornet.com/index.php

William Brewer was a James Merrill Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in February 2016. He shared six poems at one of the monthly resident readings.

William Brewer was born and raised in West Virginia. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, The Nation, A Public Space, and other journals. He has received fellowships from Columbia University, Poets & Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, and Stanford University, where he will be a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow (2016-2018).

For more information: http://williambrewer.net/#about

Visiting Writer Kwame Dawes shares his work with the VSC community in February 2016. Kwame was born in Ghana in 1962 and spent much of his childhood in Jamaica. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, Impossible Flying, Back of Mount Peace, Hope’s Hospice, Wheels, and Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems. Dawes’ novels include She’s Gone, and Bivouac, and his non-fiction collections include A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative, and Fugue and Other Writings. He is also the author of Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius, a study of the musician’s lyrics. Awards include an Emmy and Webby for Live Hope Love, an interactive website based on the Kwame Dawes Pulitzer Prize Center project HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica; the Forward Prize for Poetry; the Hollis Summers Prize for Poetry; a Pushcart Prize; and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, among others. Dawes currently serves as Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Kwame's visit was sponsored, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Simone Muench shares a selection of her poetry as a Visiting Writer at Vermont Studio Center in March 2016. Simone was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas and now lives in Chicago, IL. She is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing, which received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Lampblack & Ash, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Orange Crush; Disappearing Address, co-written with Philip Jenks; Wolf Centos; and Trace, which received the Black River Chapbook Prize from Black Lawrence Press. She is the recipient of the 2014 Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, a 2013 NEA Fellowship for Poetry award, and two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, among other awards. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago and serves as Professor of English at Lewis University, where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Simone Muench's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

http://simonemuench.com/