Vermont Studio Center

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. Jean Valentine's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Edward Hirsch has published eight collections of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; his second, Wild Gratitude (1986) won the award in 1987. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received a MacArthur “genius” award in 1997. In addition to his poetry work he is also known for running the “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post. To read more about him please visit: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edward-hirsch

Edward Hirsch has published eight collections of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; his second, Wild Gratitude (1986) won the award in 1987. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received a MacArthur “genius” award in 1997. In addition to his poetry work he is also known for running the “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post. To read more about him please visit: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edward-hirsch

Brian Teare has published four full-length books: The Room Where I was Born, Sight Map, The Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses. He has also published seven chapbooks: Pilgrim, Transcendental Grammar Crown, Paradise Was Typeset, Helplessness, Black Sun Crown, and Sore Eros. Teare is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society. He is currently an assistant professor at Temple University in Philadelphia where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Please visit his website for more information: http://www.brianteare.net/about

Phillip Lopate is the author of several collections of essays, novels, novellas, poetry collections, scholarly works, biography, and writings on the craft of nonfiction and teaching. His essays, fiction, poetry, film, and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories (1974), The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia. Teeth was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award and Kingdom Animalia won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Girmay is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and she also teaches poetry in Drew University's low-residency MFA program. Aracelis Girmay's visit was generously funded by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Stephen Narain (January/February 2015) shares the opening of his novel-in-progress. Stephen is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he won the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. In 2012, he was selected by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest for the festival's New Talent Showcase, spotlighting the best emerging Caribbean writers. His stories and essays have appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Small Axe: A Platform for Caribbean Criticism.

Leah Hampton is a fiction writer from North Carolina who attended VSC in December 2014. Here, she reads from the opening scene of "Dollywood," a short story about a woman hoping for a chance to talk to Dolly Parton.

Sio San Un is a poet and writer native to Macau. She graduated from Peking University and the University of Toronto and has won several writing prizes, including the New Star’s People’s Literature Prize of Poetry and the Macao Literature Prize. Her works can be found in journals throughout Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China.

Jeremy Tiang is a translator located in Brooklyn, NY. He has translated various writers, including You Jin, Su Wei-chen and Wong Yoon Wah. His awards and grants include the PEN/ Heim Translation Grant (2013), a National Arts Council Singapore Arts Creation Fund Grant (2012)and a SPH-NAC Golden Point Award (2009).

Patrick Rosal is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Boneshepherds (2011), which was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets; My American Kundiman (2006); Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003); and Brooklyn Antediluvian (forthcoming in 2016).

His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including The New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Grantland, Brevity, The Beacon Best, and The Best American Poetry. His awards include the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken, for his chapbook Uncommon Denominators, and a 2009 a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines.

Patrick Rosal is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program. Learn more at www.patrickrosal.com