Vermont Studio Center

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her most recent book is Gods of Want (One World/Random House, 2022). Her next books are a novel titled Organ Meats and a novella titled Cecilia. She lives in California.

kmingchang.com

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

Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Talusan has published in Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Boston magazine, The Boston Globe, and other outlets and anthologies, including Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. In 2022, she was awarded fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Brother Thomas Fund. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.

gracetalusan.com

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

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Her writing has appeared widely in periodicals and magazines in the US and abroad and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia’s writing is translated into Spanish, Bengali, Persian, Chinese, Tamil, and other languages. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Faizullah currently lives in Dallas.

tfaizullah.com

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

Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry -- most recently, Previously Owned (2022), and Scale (2017) -- both from Four Way Books. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review.

nathanmcclain.com

Author photo courtesy of Moe Nazemi Photography.

Crystal Wilkinson is the national award-winning author of Perfect Black (winner of a 2022 NAACP Image Award), The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in the The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Story, and Agni. Her most recent novel, a lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.

Crystal identifies as a southern, feminist fiction writer, and grew up in the hills of Kentucky. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program and Associate Chair of the English Department. She is a 2020 USA Artist Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 O. Henry Prize winner and makes her home in Lexington, KY. Crystal is a fellow of the Academy of American Poets was named the Poet Laureate for Kentucky in 2021. Her culinary memoir, Praisesongs for the Kitchen Ghosts is forthcoming from Clarkson/Potter Penguin Random House in 2023.

crystalewilkinson.net

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

Jane Brox‘s fifth book, Silence, was published in January 2019, and was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It received the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her previous book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine. She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award.

Brox has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The Georgia Review, NewYorker.com, Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission. She has taught at Harvard University, Bowdoin College, and in Lesley University’s low-residency MFA Program. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

janebrox.com

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), and The Maybe-Bird (forthcoming 2022), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her poetry has recently appeared in POETRY London, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. Jennifer currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the Literary Assistant to the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.

jenniferfoerster.com/

The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Author photo courtesy of Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother's Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Black is the Body won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Emily’s previous books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age; and, with Deborah Willis, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her work has appeared in: Harper’s, TLS, The New Republic, The New Yorker, O the Oprah Magazine, Image, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and twin daughters.

The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

emilybernard.com

This recording starts at the last description of a series of slides which Maud Casey shared, and were part of the archival research for the book, City of Incurable Women.

Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, most recently City of Incurable Women, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. She is the recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, A Public Space, and Literary Imagination. She teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Washington, DC.

The 2022 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

maudcasey.com

Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.

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