Vermont Studio Center

Michael Martone's most recent books are Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, were all published recently. With Robin Hemley, he edited Extreme Fiction. With Lex Williford, he edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, and other magazines. His awards include two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation; his stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. He is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.

Brian Kiteley has published three novels, The River Gods, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, and Still Life with Insects. He has also written two books of fiction exercises, The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough. Kiteley has received Guggenheim, Whiting, and NEA fellowships, and had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Millay, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is director of creative writing at the University of Denver.

Rick Moody is the author of four novels (GARDEN STATE, THE ICE STORM, PURPLE AMERICA, and THE DIVINERS), three collections of stories, and a memoir (THE BLACK VEIL). He's at work on a new novel and a collection of essays on music.

Waldman has written more than 40 books, including the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, the innovative Marriage: A Sentence; and the meditative Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble. Her most recent is Manatee Humanity (2009), a hybrid-poem that explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore and encounters, dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual. Outrider, a collection of poems, essays, and interviews, is a look at what poetry and the role of the poet can be. Waldman is cofounder, with Allen Ginsberg, of the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Recipient of many awards, she is the Artistic Director for Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and teaches in New England College’s MFA program.

Tim Seibles is the author of several poetry collections including, Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. He was the poet-in-residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania for the spring semester of 2010. Most recently, his poems were featured in the Cortland Review and Ploughshares. His work was also published in the newly released anthologies, Black Nature and Seriously Funny. His next collection, Fast Animal, will be released from Cleveland State University Press in spring 2011. He lives in Virginia where he teaches writing at Old Dominion University. He is also visiting faculty for the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine.

On May 27, 1941, Simon J. Ortiz was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He attended Fort Lewis College and the University of New Mexico for undergraduate studies. He received his MFA as an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa's Writer's School in 1969.

His books of poetry include: Telling and Showing Her: The Earth, The Land (Just Buffalo Literary Center, 1995); After and Before the Lightning (1994); Woven Stone (1992); From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America (1981), for which he received a Pushcart Prize; A Good Journey (1977); Going for the Rain (1976); and Naked in the Wind (1971).

He has also published children's books, memoirs, non-fiction, and short stories, and served as editor of various books and anthologies.

Ortiz is a recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, the New Mexico Humanities Council Humanitarian Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and was an Honored Poet at the 1981 White House Salute to Poetry. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Returning the Gift Festival of Native Writers.

Ortiz lives in the Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, where he was lieutenant governor and a consulting editor of the Pueblo of Acoma Press. He has taught writing and Native American literature at various institutions, and currently teaches at the University of Toronto.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the graduate writing program at Otis College of Art and Design (in Los Angeles).

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.

His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Since then, he has published several books of poems, most recently Special Orders (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Lay Back the Darkness (2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); and The Night Parade (1989).

He is also the author of the prose volumes The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt, 2002), Responsive Reading (1999), and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), which the poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, he published Poet's Choice (Harcourt, 2007), which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay-letters running in the Washington Post Book World.

Nicholas Delbanco is the author of twenty-three novels, collections of short stories, and non-fiction works. Delbanco's work has received numerous awards and honors including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a professor in the department of language and literature at Bennington College from 1966-85 and is currently the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and Chair of the Hopwood Committee. His most recent non-fiction book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011.

Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002) which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry. At Emory University she is Professor of English and holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.