Vermont Studio Center

Kim Coleman Foote is the author of the debut novel Coleman Hill, named a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, NAACP Image Award, and Audie Award, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Inspired by Kim’s family, Coleman Hill weaves fact and fiction to trace their Great Migration journey from Alabama and Florida to Vauxhall, New Jersey, examining the rarely-heard stories of black migrants in the suburban North. Kim’s forthcoming novel, Salt Water Sister, moves between 1700s and 1990s Ghana, looking at the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on three women’s lives, while exploring the cyclical nature of history and its continued impact on our lives today.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Kim has received writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Center for Fiction, a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct fieldwork in Ghana, and writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Kweli, and elsewhere.

kimfoote.com

Author photo courtesy of Sara Abbaspour

The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Maya Marshall is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor. Winner of the 2024 Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, Marshall is the author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love (2022). Marshall co-founded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall is the recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Vermont Studio Center, and Emory University, among others. Her poems and essays have been published in or are forthcoming in numerous collections and publications including Prose for the People (Penguin Random House, 2025), American Poetry Review, the Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner. She serves as an acquiring editor for Haymarket Books and as a program consultant for the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a literary fellowship for writers impacted by carceral systems.

mayamarshallpoetry.com

Author photo courtesy of Ashley Kaushinger

The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Brendan Shay Basham (Diné) is Tó Ts’ohnii (Big Water) and Bit’ah’nii (Folded-Arms People), born for bilagáana (Irish, Scottish, English, German). A writer, artist, educator, and recovering chef, Brendan was born in Alaska and raised in northern Arizona. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and BA in Liberal Arts from the Evergreen State College. His debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished, was released August 22, 2023, from Harper Books, flagship imprint of HarperCollins.

Brendan’s work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Santa Fe Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and Juked, among other publications. He is a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Writers, the Ucross Foundation’s first Native American Literary Award, and fellowships from the Truman Capote Trust, Writing By Writers, and Tin House. He is a fiction faculty member at UNR – Lake Tahoe’s Creative Writing MFA Program.

papayathief.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Yale Review and has been honored with fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency and with the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and the University of Texas in Austin. Her third book of poems, An Authentic Life, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October 2024.

The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental nonfiction. Their first book, Voice of the Fish (Graywolf, 2022), won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Initially specializing in Phenomenology and Visual Arts scholarship, they hold MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the École normale supérieure, Paris, and Concordia University, Montreal. They teach at Columbia University and live in New York with their wife, the writer Jaquira Díaz.

larshorn.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

J. Bruce Fuller is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared at The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Director of Texas Review Press.

jbrucefuller.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Claire Luchette is the author of Agatha of Little Neon and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.

Claire's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, VQR, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Granta, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, and Indiana Review. Their story "New Bees" won a 2020 Pushcart Prize.

Claire was the 2022-23 Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. They've received grants and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the.Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, MacDowell, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, John Carroll University, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

They studied at Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Oregon, and now they teach creative writing at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.

claireluchette.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, loves saturated color, and believes in queer possibility. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, City of Laughter, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in winter 2024.

temimfruchter.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Jen Soriano (she~they) is a Filipinx writer and movement builder who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. Jen has won the International Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Fugue Prose Prize, and fellowships from Hugo House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen is also an independent scholar and performer, author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry, and co-editor of Closer to Liberation: A Pina/xy Activist Anthology. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Jen is also a co-founder of the cultural democracy institutions, MediaJustice and ReFrame. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen now lives with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea. Her debut book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, is now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.

jensoriano.net

Photo Credit: Naomi Ishisaka

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Kerrin McCadden was the recipient of the 2022 Herb Lockwood Prize for excellence in the arts in Vermont. She is the author of two poetry collections, most recently American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, 2021), finalist for the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and on The Slowdown. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, The Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. McCadden holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at the Center for Technology, Essex. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.

kerrinmccadden.net

Author photo courtesy of Jess Dewes, 2020.