Vermont Studio Center

December 2014 resident, Morgan Willis, is a novelist, editor, activist and strategic consultant who currently resides in Detroit, Michigan. Listen to Morgan read from a current work in progress, "Politics from Nowhere."

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two story collections and a novel, THREATS, a nominee for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.

Brian Holton is a poet & prize-winning translator from Scotland. He has published numerous translations, including Jade Ladder: A Bloodaxe Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (UK 2012) and several volumes of the work of poet Yang Lian (Lee Valley Poems (UK 2009), Pisces Rising (UK 2008), Sailor’s Home (UK, 2005), Concentric Circles (UK 2005), and Notes of a Blissful Ghost: Selected Poems (Hong Kong 2002)). At Vermont Studio Center, he worked on a translation of a new collection by Yang Lian. Here he reads from his translation of “Peking Opera Lesson,” completed during his residency.

Hear October 2014 resident Sharon Gelman reads from the opening of her novel (currently titled Exile). Gelman is an essayist, author, speechwriter, and activist who is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson. Her work has appeared in Tutu, The Authorized Portrait (HarperCollins, 2011), Essence.com (December 2010), and Tutu as I Knew Him. (Umuzi-Random House, 2006).

Alice Notley is the author of more than twenty books of poetry including The Descent of Alette and Mysteries of Small Houses. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the L.A. Times Book Award for Poetry. In 2001, she received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award. Born in Arizona, Notley grew up in California. She was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the New York school of poetry.

Yi Sha was born in 1966 in Chengdu, and moved with his family at the age of two to the central Chinese city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. He published his first poems while still at school, studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University, and became a noted figure among China’s university student poets. He has worked on literary magazines, as a TV presenter and independent publisher, and is now an assistant professor at the Xi’an International Studies University.

Martin Winter is a translator and poet from Vienna, Austria. He has translated several Chinese poets . His translations have appeared in the Poetry International Festival, South China Morning Post, the Taipei Times and Poetry Sky.

Their joint residency in October 2014 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.

Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She lives on Cape Cod, where she, in the eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc.

Our fifth Cave Canem Fellow, Makalani Bandele, reads from his invented form, the etude. Bandele's work appears or is forthcoming in The New Sound, Barely South Review, and Red Holler: Contemporary Appalachian Literature.

Michael Hofmann (b. 1957) is a German-born poet and translator. He has published six books of poetry: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona (1993), Approximately Nowhere (1999), and Selected Poems (2009). With James Lasdun, he edited the influential anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994). A selection of his criticism, Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, was published in 2002. He has edited and introduced short selections of the poems of Robert Lowell (2001) and John Berryman (2003), and has edited the anthology Twentieth Century German Poetry (2006).

Hofmann has alsotranslated some seventy books from the German, mainly novels, including works by Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and Wim Wenders. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books and Poetry (Chicago).

For his poetry he has won a Cholmondeley Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and an English Arts Council grant; for his translations the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize, the Weidenfeld Oxford Translation Prize (twice), and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Deutsche Akademie der Künste.

He received his BA (1979) and MA (1984) in English from Cambridge University. He teaches at the University of Florida and He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the New School University, and Barnard College, Columbia University.

Peter Stamm a Swiss novelist, short-story writer, and radio dramatist joined German-born poet and translator, Michael Hofmann, to present to the VSC community about their experiences with literary translation. Stamm worked as an accountant for nearly a decade before becoming a writer. His sparse writing style has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann.

Michael Hofmann has translated some seventy books from German, mainly novels, including works by Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and Wim Wenders. Michael Hofmann also has published six books of poetry and with James Lasdun, he edited the influential anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994).