Vermont Studio Center

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, published by Penguin. Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. They earned their BA in History from Brown University and MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Profess of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

iampaultran.com

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

Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and The Rib King. Her most recent book The Last Suspicious Holdout, a collection of stories, was published in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly and Callaloo among other venues. She is a recipient of a Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida. She currently lives in New Orleans.

ladeehubbard.com

Author photo courtesy of Vilma Samulionyte

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

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020), and the forthcoming Silver (FSG, 2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new edition of which is forthcoming from FSG) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. His translations, primarily from Catalan, have appeared widely; including his translation of Salvador Espriu’s classic short-story collection Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Phillips has written on contemporary art for Artforum as well as for David Kordansky Gallery. In 2021, an exhibition inspired by one of Phillips’ poems, “The Beatitudes of Malibu” debuted at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the President of the Board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University, where he earned his doctorate in English Literature, Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He divides his time between New York City and Barcelona with his wife and two daughters.

rowanricardophillips.com

Author photo courtesy of Sue Kwon.

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

Miciah Bay Gault is the author of the novel Goodnight Stranger (Park Row, 2019), which was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and selected for Poets & Writers’ First Fiction roundup. Miciah was the 2023 Shane Stevens Fellow in the Novel at Bread Loaf, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Agni, The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, The New York Times Modern Love Column, and other places. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is coordinator of the Vermont Book Award.

miciahbaygault.com

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

Ricardo Wilson is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books, 2021) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern UP, 2020). An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories was selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award. His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, Northwest Review, The Offing, and Stirring. Ricardo is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America.

ricardoawilson.com

Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA CW at IAIA. Her memoir WHISKEY TENDER (HarperCollins) was named one of the most anticipated books to watch for in 2024 by Zibby Media with a publication date set for February 27th. She has won fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, A Public Space, and the NY State Summer Writer’s Institute. She earned her MFA in Iowa City, and her writing can be found in Salon, Brevity, LARB, the Best American series, and other places. She comes from the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo and is the editor-in-chief of River Styx Magazine.

deborahtaffa.com

Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (UGA Press, 2008).

He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Terrain.org, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in almost two dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. His poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and on The Slowdown podcast hosted by Tracy K. Smith. A selection of poems from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean.

He has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

seanhillpoetry.com

Author photo courtesy of Geoff Wyatt.

Nandi Comer is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. She is the Michigan Poet Laureate.

nandicomer.com

The 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

christophermerrillbooks.com

Author photo courtesy of Ram Devineni

Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; he is a longstanding co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

jasonschneiderman.net