Vermont Studio Center

Susan Mitchell is the author of three books of poems, most recently Erotikon and Rapture which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. She has been honored with grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, and The New Republic and have appeared in several volumes of the Best American Poetry series and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Mitchell holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its MFA Writing Program.

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.

Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the HumanForm (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics CirlcleAward and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children's book, TheLittle General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by ElizabethZechel, was published byTin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, will be published byMcSweeney's in 2010. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

McNair is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Creative Writers, and in 2006 a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000, fifty of which were awarded across the arts to a selection of "America's finest living artists." Other honors include the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry (for Fire); the Devins Award for poetry; the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Theodore Roethke prize from Poetry Northwest; the Pushcart Prize, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal (also awarded to Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, et. al.) for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters." He has received three honorary degrees for literary distinction.

A two-time recipient of Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, Wesley McNair has read his poetry at the Library of Congress and a wide range of colleges and universities. A television series aired over affiliates of PBS on Robert Frost for which he wrote the scripts received an Emmy Award. Featured on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs) and 14 times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, his work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over sixty anthologies and textbooks. He has served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

A reading celebrating the publication of From Sorrow’s Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth, edited by Shaun T. Griffin. An acclaimed American poet and critic, Hayden Carruth lived for many years along the Foote Brook in Johnson and wrote some of his most lasting and significant poems about the rural environment and people of northern Vermont. This book launch features readings and reflections by:

Shaun T. Griffin

Geof Hewitt

David Budbill

Baron Wormser

Rose Marie Carruth

Melissa Bank is the author of two story collections The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. She received the Nelson Algren Award for short fiction from the Chicago Tribune and holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. Her work has been translated into 33 languages.

Lu De’an, a native of Fujian province, was born in 1960. His initial interest in poetry was sparked by the emergence of the so-called “obscure” poets at the end of the 1970s, and his friendship with Shu Ting, another Fukienese who is probably one of the most extraordinary Chinese poets of the second half of the twentieth century, but he trained as a commercial artist, and has learned much from modernist painting as a poet. He was associated with the Nanjing-based ‘Them’ [Tamen] group, and published frequently in its unofficial journal which was launched in 1985. ‘Nude’, a poem from the Them Decade Anthology was published in 1991.

Lu’s published individual collections include, A Place to Dwell (2011), Rocks (2000), North of South [Nanfang yi bei], Paper Serpent [Zhi she] and Another Half of Life [Ling yiban shengming]. Important in terms of his life experience was the time he spent in New York between the years 1991 and 1994 (New York serves a faint back-drop to his poem ‘As Told to the Poet: 1’). To this day, he continues to pursue a career as a poet and a painter, and currently works freelance.

Mindy Zhang is a Chinese poet and translator. She is the main editor of two books of Chinese poetry translations, forthcoming on Tupelo Press: The Book of Cranes: The Poetry of Zang Di; and New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry 1990-2012.

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

A 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Peter Cole is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), and Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon). With Adina Hoffman, he is also the author of a book of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken/Nextbook). Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association Brody Medal for Jewish Book of the Year, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman writes often of the Middle East, approaching it from unusual angles and shedding light on overlooked dimensions of the place, its people, and their cultures. Her books include House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century. The latter was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the best biographies of the year by Booklist. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the Jewish book of 2011. A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she is one of the inaugural (2013) winners of the Windham-Campbell Literary Prizes, administered by the Beinecke Library.

A 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Peter Cole is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), and Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon). With Adina Hoffman, he is also the author of a book of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken/Nextbook). Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association Brody Medal for Jewish Book of the Year, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Annick Smith is author of the memoir Homestead, as well as a collection of essays, In This We Are Native, and a history of the tallgrass prairies, Big Bluestem. She was co-editor with William Kittredge of the Montana anthology, The Last Best Place, and co-editor with Susan O’Connor of The Wide Open: Prose Poems and Photographs of the Prairie. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many magazines and journals including Story, Outside, Orion, Audubon, Travel & Leisure, Triquarterly, and the NY Times Traveler. Smith’s film credits include being executive producer of the feature HEARTLAND and co-producer of A River Runs Through it. Her documentary credits include a public television series The Real People, for KSPS-TV, Spokane, about seven tribes in the Inland Northwest, as well as a portrait of poet Richard Hugo, Kicking The Loose Gravel Home. Smith was a founding member of the Sundance Film Institute, has won numerous literary and film awards, and directed the Yellow Bay Writers Workshop for eleven years. She has taught creative writing at the University of Montana as well as other writing workshops and conferences. She has lived in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley since 1971, raised a family there, and has been an ardent voice for conservation and protection of the environment.