Vermont Studio Center

Three Chinese poets, Tang Siu Wa, Zang Li, and Yang Xiaobin read poems written at Vermont Studio Center during their month-long residency in January 2016, along with their paired translators Jennifer Feeley, Eleanor Goodman, and Canaan Morse, who share their translations of each piece. The group discussed the context of the work, and also held a conversation afterward about poetry and the nature of translation. The conversation/readings are in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The six were on residency together supported by a generous grant from the Luce Foundation. A link to the new fellowship application: http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/lit-the-literature-in-translation-program.

(photo––standing l to r: Yang Xiaobin, Canaan Morse, Jennifer Feeley, and Zang Li; sitting: Eleanor Goodman and Tang Siu Wa)

Tang Siu Wa 鄧小樺is a poet, prose writer, curator, and human rights activist from Hong Kong, as well as the founding editor of the literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres and co-founder of the House of Hong Kong Literature. She is the author of the poetry collections Unmoved Bottle and The Opposite of Sound, the essay collections A Motley of Banalities and As If Nothing Happened, and a collection of interviews Asking Directions from the People. She is also the editor of the collections Wait and See: Collected Works of Six New Hong Kong Writers, The Tomb of Film, and The Same Darkness Befalls Dawn: Hong Kong June Fourth Poetry. She teaches creative writing at various institutions in Hong Kong and writes columns and criticism for a variety of local media.

Jennifer Feeley holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and has taught at the University of Iowa. She has published poetry, translations of poetry and prose from Chinese into English, and articles on Chinese literature and cinema in various journals and anthologies, including FIELD, Epiphany, Tinfish, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Chinese Writers on Writing, among others. She is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi (Zephyr Press and MCCM Creations, 2016) and co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Zang Di 臧棣, a poet, critic, translator, and editor, was born in Beijing in 1964. Now a professor at Peking University, he has taught in the US, Japan, and Taiwan. Widely acknowledged as the leading poet-critic of his generation, Zang has published many books of poetry and edited several major anthologies of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry.

Eleanor Goodman’s book of translations, Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. The book was also shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize. Her first collection of poetry, Nine Dragon Island (Enclave/Zephyr, 2016), was a finalist for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize.

July 2015 resident and Giving Tuesday fellow Lania Knight talks about her writing process at VSC and reads part of her upcoming novel, Remnant.

Lania Knight's first book, Thee Cubic Feet, was a finalist for the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction. Her stories, essays, and interviews have been published in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, PANK, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rumpus, Jabberwock Review, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Quiddity and Literary Mama. She was a Resident Writing Fellow at Vermont Studio Center in July 2015, and she currently lives in the UK where she teaches as a Senior Lecturer at University of Gloucestershire. Read more about her at www.laniaknight.com.

VSC residents and 2015 Luce Foundation Fellows Yi Mimi and her translator Steve Bradbury read a selection of poems in the Mason House Library.

Ye Mimi is a Taiwanese poet and filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Department at Dong Hwa University and the MFA Film Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is the author of two volumes of poetry and has internationally exhibited several of her poetry films. Through collaging her words and images, she improvises a new landscape trying to erase the border between poetry and image making. Most recently, a bilingual chapbook of her poems was published by Anomalous Press under the title His Days Go by the Way Her Years.

Steve Bradbury is a long-standing member of American Literary Translators Association and a former professor of English who translates the work of contemporary poets writing in Chinese. His most recent translations (Ye Mimi’s His Days Go By the Way Her Years and Hsia Yü’s Salsa) were short-listed for (respectively) the 2014 Best Translated Book Award and 2015 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. He lives in Ft. White, Florida.

ZZ Packer shares a short story during a Resident Reading at Vermont Studio Center. She was a resident for the month of August, 2015.

ZZ received her BA from Yale University in English Literature, an MA from Johns Hopkins and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the highly acclaimed “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories,” which was a National Book Award 5 Under 35 Winner and a New York Times notable book. Her new novel, “The Thousands,” is forthcoming in 2016. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, Zoetrope, and Harpers, among many others, and her non-fiction in the New York Times Magazine and also the Book Review, Smithsonian Magazine, The Oxford American, and Salon.com, to name but a few. Currently at MIT, ZZ has taught at San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts, University of Houston, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and University of Texas. She was the Distinguished Visiting Lurie Chair at San Jose State University, Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and Zale Distinguished Lecturer at Tulane. Residencies include MacDowell Colony, Ucross, and Villa Montalvo, and she has been awarded the Radcliffe Institute Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellowship at Harvard, American Academy in Berlin Prize, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.

Major Jackson is an American poet, professor and the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Hoops (W.W. Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. He is also a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.

Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell and currently serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Diana Goetsch speaks in an interview about her current work and practice while at Vermont Studio Center, followed by her reading four poems as part of the Resident Reading night on September 6, 2015. The discussion/introduction was held with Laurie Macfee, Writing Coordinator at VSC, in the Mason House Library a couple days after the evening reading in the Lowe Lecture Hall in Johnson, VT.

Diana Goetsch (formerly Douglas Goetsch) is the author of Nameless Boy, The Job of Being Everybody and several other volumes of poems. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and numerous other journals and anthologies. Among her honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Donald Murray Prize.

Diana is an experienced and innovative writing teacher who has taught at colleges, conferences and MFA programs, in addition to teaching privately—one-on-one, and group workshops in her New York City apartment. She is also the editor of Jane Street Press, a unique, zero-profit poetry press she founded in 2001.

Please visit her website for further information: http://dianagoetsch.com/

Photograph by Laurie Macfee 2015, VSC

In June, VSC was lucky to have two additional writers visit on residency for a week, actor/writer/activist Alan Cumming and poet/musician/editor Matt Hart. They joined a wickedly talented group to conclude a great night’s resident reading on June 23, 2015. Alan shared an essay he worked on while VSC and Matt read a series of recent poems.

Alan Cumming is a Tony and Olivier award winning theatre actor (Cabaret, Hamlet, Threepenny Opera, Design for Living, Macbeth, etc), National Board of Review winner and Independent Spirit Award nominated film actor (Goldeneye, Emma, X2:X Men United, The Anniversary Party, etc), and a Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG award nominated television actor (Sex and the City, the L Word, The Good Wife, etc), as well as an author and activist. Alan trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In addition, he is an Independent Spirit award-winning producer and National Board of Review winning director, has sung at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the London Palladium and the Sydney Opera House, and received humanitarian awards from AMFAR, Human Rights Campaign, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, GLAAD and the Trevor Project, to name but a few.

Matt Hart is the author of several books of poems, including Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012) and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY Magazine, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL.

A. H. Jerriod Avant was the Callaloo Fellow in residency at Vermont Studio Center in June 2015. This recording blends two readings he did during his stay at VSC: the first, in the Mason House library, serves as a quiet introduction or segue into his second public reading in the Lecture Hall.

Jerriod was born in Longtown, MS. A graduate of Jackson State University, he has earned M.FA. degrees from Spalding University and New York University, where he was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. An alumnus of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Brown University, his poems have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Boston Review, Pinwheel, Louisville Review, The Rumpus, and other journals. Jerriod is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations, finalist for the 2015 Mississippi Review Prize, recipient of the Joseph F. McCrindle Online Editorial Fellowship at Poets & Writers, a Vermont Studio Center residency and a 2015 -2016 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997) and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). In 2002, the novel Doctor Sleep was adapted as a film, Close Your Eyes, starring Goran Visnjic, Paddy Considine, and Shirley Henderson. Forty Words For Fear, an album of songs co-written by Bell and Wyn Cooper and inspired by the novel Anything Goes,was released by Gaff Music in 2003; other performers include Don Dixon, Jim Brock, Mitch Easter and Chris Frank.

Bell's eighth novel, All Soul's Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That The Builder Refused, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture A Biography was published by Pantheon in 2007. Devil's Dream, a novel based on the career of Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was published by Pantheon in 2009. Bell's latest novel, The Color of Night, appeared from Vintage Contemporaries in April 2011.

Nandi Comer gave a public reading as the culmination of her year-long residency as a staff artist and Writing Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center. Nandi received a joint MFA/MA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, and Callaloo. She is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in A Beautiful House: Writers-in-Residence on Teaching (Wayne State University Press, 2014), Detroit Anthology (Rust Belt Chic Press, 2014), Another and Another: An Anthology From the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press, 2012), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Sycamore Review.

Reading with Nandi is Maria Robinson, the Marketing and Communications Manager at the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and has done graduate work at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in PANK, the Bellevue Literary Review, the cream city review, Spork, and Pindeldyboz among others.