Vermont Studio Center

Resident composer and musician Bill Frisell performed at the Red Mill, showcasing new compositions he'd created while at VSC. Born in Baltimore, Bill Frisell played clarinet throughout his childhood in Denver, Colorado. His interest in guitar began with his exposure to pop music on the radio. Soon, the Chicago Blues became a passion through the work of Otis Rush, B.B. King, Paul Butterfield and Buddy Guy. In high school, he played in bands covering pop and soul classics, James Brown and other dance material. Later, Bill studied music at the University of Northern Colorado before attending Berklee College of Music in Boston where he studied with John Damian, Herb Pomeroy and Michael Gibbs. In 1978, Frisell moved for a year to Belgium where he concentrated on writing music. In this period, he toured with Michael Gibbs and first recorded with German bassist Eberhard Weber. Bill moved to the New York City area in 1979 and stayed until 1989. He now lives in Seattle.

Photo by Monica Frisell.

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Her Inferno (A poet's novel) (2010), tells the story of that decision, and was described by John Ashbery as “Zingingly funny and melancholy.” Eileen’s books of poetry include Not Me, School of Fish, Skies, Maxfield Parrish and Sorry,Tree. Chelsea Girls (1994) was her first fiction book, followed by Cool for You, a nonfiction novel (2000). In San Diego she wrote the libretto for the opera Hell (composed by Michael Webster). She directed the writing program at the University of California at San Diego for five years, returning to New York in 2007. Eileen's articles and columns have appeared in Art Forum, Art in America, Book Forum, Parkett, the Harriet blog, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her essays were collected in The Importance of Being Iceland (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writers grant. In 2010, the Poetry Society of American awarded Myles the Shelley Memorial Award.

Catherine Despont was a writing resident in January 2014. Here she discusses the frozen Gihon river, and what it means for her writing process.

Howard Norman is the author of three novels including The Museum Guard. His first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were finalists for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Prize, The New England Bookseller's Association Award, 3 fellowships from the NEA, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His translations of Inuit folktales have earned him two Translation Center Awards from Columbia University. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, and lives in VT and Washington, D.C.

Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards , and was collected in The Bostons, which won the PEN/Bingham award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Anna Coe was a writing resident at the Vermont Studio Center in December 2013. Here, she discusses the role of memory in her writing.

Yannick Murphy is the author of the novels, THE CALL, SIGNED, MATA HARI, HERE THEY COME, and THE SEA OF TREES. Her story collections include STORIES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE and IN A BEAR'S EYE. Her children's books include THE COLD WATER WITCH, BABY POLAR, and AHWOOOOOOOO!. She is the recipient of various awards including a Whiting Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts award, a Chesterfield Screenwriting award and her story IN A BEAR'S EYE was recently published in the 2007 O'Henry Prize Stories.

Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently the novel Five Skies. His short stories have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Tin House, The New Yorker, and other journals. It has been collected in The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Award Series, and The Pushcart Prize Annual. He is Regent's Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Since1983, Yu Xinqiao has written many books of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, most of them unpublished. He is also a painter. In addition to art creation, he has focused on supporting the arts and has curated exhibitions of art, music, film, and drama.

Brian Holton is an award-winning translator and poet. He translates Chinese works into English and Scots, and has published more than a dozen books of poetry in translation.

Their joint residency in November 2013 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.

Noy Holland’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 Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, New York Tyrant, and Post Road, 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 FC2.