Vermont Studio Center

Born in Taipei, Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton) and Mouth (Kaya Press), which won a writing award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has received a Writers’ Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and fellowships and residencies from the Center for Fiction and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Her work has appeared in Brick, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Brooklyn Rail, and other journals. She lives in New York City.

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

lisahchen.com/

Author photo courtesy of Hisayo Chen.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. With E.J. Koh, she co-translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Catapult, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and more. She is co-director for the Adoptee Literary Festival and PEN America Miami/South Florida Chapter, and a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.

marcicalabretta.com

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

Marcia Douglas is the author of novels, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her awards include a 2020 Creative Capital Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a U.K. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was long-listed for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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

marciadouglas.com

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including Atomizer, forthcoming from LSU Press, 2020, and Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, named a Books We Love 2016 by The New Yorker and a Small Press Bestseller. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.

You can read the second piece she reads here: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/some-girls-write-a-fearless-and-moral-inventory-by-elizabeth-a-i-powell/

Tina Escaja is a destructivist/a cyber-poet@, digital artist, and scholar based in Burlington, Vermont. As a literary critic, she has published extensively on gender and contemporary Latin American and Spanish poetry and technology. In 2003 she won the Dulce María Loynaz International Poetry Prize for her collection Caída Libre (Free Fall). She is the author of four additional books of poems: Respiración mecánica (2001/2014), Código de barras (2007), 13 lunas 13 (2011), and Manual destructivista/Destructivist Manual (2016) with English translations by Kristin Dykstra, a book selected among top ten bilingual readings by the Latino Poetry Review in April 2017. Escaja’s creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited at museums and galleries internationally. Her digital artifacts include the poetic series VeloCity (2000-2002), Código de barras (2007), Robopoem@s (2016), and Emblem/as (2017-2019); the interactive novel Pinzas de metal (2003); and her performance piece/poetry with sheep Negro en ovejas (2011). Escaja’s poems, fiction, and digital work have appeared in numerous anthologies and have been translated into six languages. She is the instigator of the Destructivist/a movement, initiated on the grave of Vicente Huidobro in October of 2014. A selection of Escaja’s literary and digital projects can be experienced at www.tinaescaja.com.

Kristin Dykstra appears in the June 2020 Words Without Borders Translator Relay, as well as a profile for Poesía en Acción paired with an excerpt from Marcelo Morales’ manuscript, “The Star-Spangled Brand.”

Selections from Dykstra’s new poetry manuscript are forthcoming in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion and Seedings. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Cuban writer Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The book was also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards and received the Honorable Mention for Poetry in the Foreword Indies Awards. It was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, which also brought out the 2019 collection Materia Prima, a Finalist for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award, co-edited by Dykstra with Kent Johnson. Introducing Amanda Berenguer of Uruguay, Materia Prima features a team of eight co-translators. Previously, Dykstra translated Tina Escaja’s Destructivist Manual, and the University of Alabama Press published four of Dykstra’s book-length translations of contemporary Cuban poetry, including editions by Rodríguez, Flores, Angel Escobar and Marcelo Morales between 2014 and 2016. Her 2016 translation of The World as Presence, by Morales, was longlisted for the National Translation Award, and excerpts won the Gulf Coast Prize for literary translation.

This event was supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Cherline Bazile reads "God Hates Black Girls," a chapter from her novel in progress about a family on the brink of eviction. She is a Haitian-American writer from Florida. She received her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. She graduated from Harvard University and had the pleasure of attending Vermont Studio Center in June 2019. Cherline is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and her work has won three Hopwood Awards. You can follow her on Instagram @cherbazile or on Twitter @cherlinebazile.

Jennifer Brody is the award-winning author of “The 13th Continuum,” graphic novels “Spectre Deep 6” and “200,” and the Disney Chills book series, writing as Vera Strange. She’s a graduate of Harvard University and a film and television producer and writer. She began her career in Hollywood on many films, including “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Golden Compass." She lives and writes in Malibu by the beach where she’s hard at work on her next book. This is an excerpt from her short story "Let Me In." It will be featured in her forthcoming short fiction collection. The story was originally inspired by the Muslim ban, but also contains element of Cly-Fy (climate change science fiction) and more.

Her latest book release is Spectre Deep 6: https://www.turnerpublishing.com/books/detail/spectre-deep-6/

Disney Chills #1 is out July 7th: https://www.amazon.com/Part-Your-Nightmare-Disney-Chills/dp/1368048250

The 13th Continuum (Continuum Trilogy) is available here: https://www.amazon.com/13th-Continuum-Trilogy-Book/dp/1681622548

Website: www.jenniferbrody.com

Twitter: @JenniferBrody

FaceBook & Instagram: @JenniferBrodyWriter

Jonathan Vatner's first novel, Carnegie Hill, debuted in 2019 from Thomas Dunne Books. His second novel, The Bridesmaids Union, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press. He is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Poets & Writers; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in January 2019.

Read the full chapter here: http://www.midnightlit.com/archive/volume-3-summer-2019/palace-of-beauty/

Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA in fiction from NYU. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Kenyon Review Online, Santa Monica Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was the Rona Jaffe fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in June 2019. She has also received fellowships from the Writers Grotto in San Francisco and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. This piece was published in the Jan 2020 issue of Clarkesworld. It's available at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chang-eppig_01_20/ Twitter handle: @rche_types, website: www.rchetypes.com

In January 2020, Gwen enjoyed a blissful month at the Vermont Studio Center, where she worked on a work of creative non-fiction titled The Nine, the true story of nine women who escaped from the Nazis. One of those nine women was her great aunt Helene who first told Gwen her story. The book is scheduled to be published by St. Martin's Press in 2021.

Gwen is an award-winning children’s book author and poet, whose titles include Trail of Stones, The Night Shimmy, Ruth and the Green Book, and The Hiding Game. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous places including The New Republic, New England Review, Kenyon Review, London Sunday Times, and Catapult. She lives in Southern France with her three children and works as the Director at the Brown Foundation Fellowship Program at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, an artist residency program.

You can follow her work at www.gwenstrauss.com

And can find out more information about the residency program at https://maisondoramaar.org/