Visiting Writers Series - Plainfield, VermontOne of the most
anticipated aspects of the MFA in Creative Writing residencies are the Visiting
Writers Series. Visiting Writers are generous with their expertise and share
their craft with students through readings, workshops, and informal
discussions. Recent visiting writers have included Christopher Durang, Samuel R. Delaney, Jessica Hagedorn, Stephen Kuusisto, Deena Metzger, and Robert Morgan. Below are profiles of some of the low residency MFA in Creative Writing Program's recent and upcoming visiting writers at the Plainfield, Vermont residency site.
Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of seven books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008, Harper). The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001), and School of the Arts (2005, HarperCollins). He is the author of the memoirs Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007), for which he won an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001). Among his many other awards are two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty teaches in the graduate program the University of Houston, and is a frequent guest at Columbia University, Hunter College, and NYU. He lives in Houston and in New York City.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press. Recent work appears in Five Points, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, The Seattle Review, The Pinch, and in the anthologies Truth in Nonfiction and Naming the World. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch University Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA program at Fairfield University. A novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming. He lives in New York City. His website is www.paullisicky.com.
Chris Abani's prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007) GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005), Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985) and the novellas, Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006) and Song For Night (Akashic, 2007). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award & the PEN Hemingway Book Prize. Visit his website at www.chrisabani.com.
Julia Alvarez is a poet and fiction writer. She spent her early childhood in the Dominican Republic, the homeland of both her parents. In 1960, at the age of ten, her family fled to this country after her father’s underground activities against the dictatorship were discovered. Here, in the English language, she discovered the magic of books and writing. She attended Abbot Academy, Middlebury College, and Syracuse University where she earned a Masters in Creative Writing. Her first collection of poems, Homecoming, was published by Grove Press, fall l984, and reissued again with new poems by Dutton in 1996 as Homecoming: New and Collected Poems. The papers for “33,” a long sonnet sequence in Homecoming, were bought by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and included in their 1996 exhibit, “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, From John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” Her first novel, How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, won the PEN Josephine Miles Book Award for 1992 and was selected a Notable Book by The New York Times and an American Library Notable Book, 1992. Her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Award in fiction, 1995. Her second book of poems, The Other Side/EL Otro Lado, was published in 1995. Her third novel, ÁYO!, was published in January, 1997. Her novels have been translated into several languages including, Spanish, French, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Greek, Swedish, and German. Her book of essays, Something to Declare, was published in the fall, 1998. A children’s story, The Secret Footprints, will be out in the spring 2000 from Knopf. In addition to her writing career, Alvarez has also been active as a teacher. She has served as Kentucky's poet in the schools for two years; she has conducted creative writing workshops for bilingual students in Delaware and senior citizens in North Carolina, workshops which culminated in two anthologies, Yo Soy/I Am and Old Age Ain't for Sissies. She has taught English and Creative Writing at California State College, College of the Sequoias, Phillips Andover Academy, the University of Vermont, and the University of Illinois. In l984-85, Ms. Alvarez held the Jenny McKean Moore Writing Fellowship at the George Washington University. Alvarez has been a Scholar in poetry and fiction (l979, 83), a Fellow in fiction (l986), and a staff member (l987, 1988) at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. Since 1988, Alvarez has taught at Middlebury College where she is the Writer-in-Residence. Other awards for her fiction and poetry include: the Third Woman Press Award in Fiction; a General Electric Younger Writers' Award, 1986, in fiction; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, l987; an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, 1990, in fiction, as well as the American Poetry Review’s Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Prize for poetry, 1996. In May, 1997, the national book fair in the Dominican Republic was dedicated to her, in honor, especially, of her novel In The Time Of The Butterflies. The book recounts, fictionally, the story of three sisters who started the underground against the dictator and were murdered in 1960. Three months earlier, Julia Alvarez and her family had escaped to the United States.
In a dozen books--both novels and collections of stories--Banks has written of ordinary people with affection and compassion. Yet these ordinary people feel compelled to wreck their own lives and the lives of those around them he has "ever more clearly emerged," Fred Pfeil wrote in the Voice Literary Supplement, "as a writer from the white working class, writing directly about the rage and damage, the capitulations, self-corruptions, and small resistances of subordinated lives." Because he was raised by "one of those working women with four kids," Banks observes, "I have a less obstructed path as a writer to get to the center of their lives. Part of the challenge of what I write is uncovering the resiliency of that kind of life, and part is in demonstrating that event he quietest lives can be as compels and rich, as joyous, conflicted and anguished, as other, seemingly more dramatic lives." His novels include, among others, The Book of Jamaica (1980), Continental Drift (1985), Affliction (1989), The Sweet Hereafter (1991), Rule of the Bone (1995), and most recently Cloudsplitter (1998). With Cloudsplitter, Banks undertakes to study an extraordinary man, John Brown, through the eyes of an ordinary man, his son Owen, who attempts many years later to come to terms with his father. Walter Kirn notes in The New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1998, "Banks wisely resists psychologizing this relationship, at least in modern terms. The 'dynamic' between Owen and his father is beyond dysfunctional or abusive; it's more like a geological condition, as if the father were a massive earthquake and the son a minor aftershock. The only analysis Banks indulges in is moral analysis." The novel ultimately concerns what John Brown calls 'racialism'. The father may not think in the tribal ways of white and black, but his son does. Despite following his father to Harpers Ferry, Owen is, in Kirn's words, "a guilty, conflicted white man. A faint Mason-Dixon line divides his soul." In the last few years, filmmakers have discovered Banks' work. Paul Schrader directed a film version of Affliction and is seeking a distributor, while The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan, showed in theaters this winter. Continental Drift may also find its way to film under the direction Agnieszka Holland. Unlike many writers, Banks has had good fortune; he likes the films, observing "What both Schrader and Egoyan have done is preserve the moral center of each of these books in the movies." Russell Banks has been widely honored, receiving awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Before Columbus Foundation, and Ingrain Merrill Foundation, among many others.
Marilyn Chin is the author of Dwarf Bamboo, and The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty. Her new book, The Ballad of the Plain Yellow Girl, was published by Norton in 2002. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms nationally. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Residency, the Djerassi Foundation and others. Marilyn is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of l996. She was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series The Language of Life. She co-directs the MFA program at San Diego State University. In Fall, 2003, she will be a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard.
  Nilo Cruz
Nilo Cruz, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer prize for Drama, is a young Cuban-American playwright whose work has been produced widely around the United States. His plays are many and include Anna in the Tropics,The Beauty of the Father, Night Train to Bolina, Dancing on her Knees, A Park in Our House, Two Sisters and a Piano, A Bicycle Country, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams (World premiere at New Theatre 2001), Lorca in a Green Dress, and translations of Lorca's Doña Rosita the Spinster and The House of Bernarda Alba. Nilo has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, San Francisco's W. Alton Jones award and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award. His work has been seen at the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey, at New York's Shakespeare Festival's Public Theatre, at South Coast Rep, at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, New York Theatre Workshop, Magic Theatre, Minneapolis Children's Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Washington's Studio Theatre, Florida Stage, The Coconut Grove Playhouse, and at New Theatre.
Thomas Glave was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. A graduate of Bowdoin College and Brown University, Glave traveled as a Fulbright Scholar to Jamaica, where he studied Jamaican historiography and Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. While in Jamaica, Glave worked on issues of social justice, and helped found the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG). Glave is author of the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Minnesota), nominated for a 2006 Publishing Triangle Gay Mens’ Nonfiction Award and winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award. His fiction collection, Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights), was nominated by the American Library Association for their Best Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year award and by the Quality Paperback Book Club for their Violet Quill/Best New Gay/Lesbian Fiction Award. His edited anthology, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, will appear from Duke University Press in 2008. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including an O. Henry Prize for fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Glave was named a Writer on the Verge by The Village Voice in 2000. He presently teaches in the English department at the State University of New Yorkat Binghamton.
His one-man play, Word of Mouth: The Story of a Human Satellite Dish, was presented Off Broadway by Mike Nichols and Elaine May in 1995 and won the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Solo Performance. Word of Mouth premiered at The Home for Contemporary Theater in NY and played at La Mama ETC., The New Mexico Repertory Co., The Coast Playhouse in L.A. (The L.A. Theater Weekly Award), San Francisco's Bayfront Theater (Bay Area Theater Award) and at the International Boulevard Theater Festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The short feature film, Trevor, which was written by Mr. Lecesne and based on one of the stories from Word of Mouth, received an Academy Award in 1995 for Best Live Action Short Film, and also won first prize at the Hamptons' Film Festival and honorable Mention at Sundance Film Festival. Trevor went on to inspire The Trevor Helpline -- a national, twenty four-hour, suicide-prevention hotline for Gay and Lesbian Teens. The musical play, One Man Band, written by Mr. Lecesne with music and lyrics by Larry Hochamn and Marc Elliot, premiered Off-Broadway and was produced at The Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, The Grand Center in St. Louis, and The Downstairs Cabaret Theater in Rochester. Mr. Lecesne created The Road Home: Stories of Children of War, which was presented last year at The Asia Society in NYC, and at the International Peace Initiative at The Hague. He just completed adapting Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City for Showtime, which will air in the Spring of 2001. His feature film, Virgin Territory, is being produced by John Lyons. As an actor, Mr. Lecesne's theater credits include, Cloud 9, directed by Tommy Tune, Extraordinary Measures, written and directed by Eve Ensler at Here, the 30th Anniversary production of Boys in the Band, directed by Ken Elliot, and last summer he played Armold Beckoff in Provincetown's 25th Anniversary Production of Torchsong Triology. He teaches playwriting at NYU.
Dorianne Laux is the author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Recent work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, and Ploughshares. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize for poetry, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Dorianne is an Associate Professor and works at the University of Oregon Program in Creative Writing.
Patricia Marx writes comedy because she is too shallow to do anything else. She writes for film and television; she also writes books and magazine pieces. Patricia Marx’s television credits include Saturday Night Live and Rugrats. Among her books are: How To Regain Your Virginity, Blockbuster, You Can Never Go Wrong By Lying, and several children’s books illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, including Now Everybody Really Hates Me and Now I Will Never Leave the Dinner Table. Her book Meet My Staff was the winner of the Friedrich Medal—an award that was invented by Patricia Marx and named after her air-conditioner. The Friedrich Medal has never been received by anyone other than Patricia Marx. Patricia Marx’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and the Atlantic Monthly. She would rather not talk about her film credits (a view shared, apparently, by various studio executives). Patricia Marx teaches sketch comedy at New York University. She was the first girl on the Harvard Lampoon. She is able to take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand. Patricia Marx is the oldest and favorite of three children. She grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia where she attended Abington High School, which, as was pointed out over the PA system every morning, was “First in the alphabet, first in achievement, and first in attitude!” Patricia Marx, usually known as Patty, is neither the Patricia Marx married to Daniel Ellsberg, who changed history when he released the Pentagon Papers; nor is she the ravishing young Brazilian singer Patricia Marx, whose popular albums contain a blend of hip hop, funk, Bossa Nova, and even some terrific make-out music. She would like to be mistaken for either of these women. Because she trusts you, Patricia Marx would like you to know that her banking card password is “BROKE”. For security reasons, we cannot reveal which Patricia Marx we are talking about.
Tracie Morris, one of the country's most exciting and popular spoken word poets, has worked steadily over the last decade to redefine the limits of what poetry, and a poet, can be. While she is the author of two poetry collections—Intermission and Chap-T-her Won—and has been anthologized in a host of literary volumes, an important part of her process is to determine which “medium” best suits each poem. Some of her poems are to be experienced by being read on the page, others by being performed sonically, and some poems which do both. In the case of sound poems—poems whose meaning is based on the sounds of words, not just their literal meanings—Morris believes they are meant to engage the body by the auditory and physical presence created by the incremental manipulation of the words. She holds a BA and MFA from Hunter College and an MA from New YorkUniversity where she is now a Ph. D. candidate.
Dael Orlandersmith is a playwright and performer. In 1994, she won an OBIE award for her play Beauty’s Daughter. Her other plays include The Gimmick and Liar Liar. She has appeared in productions of MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet, Raisin in the Sun, Goin’ for Dolo (with Danny Hoch on Broadway) and has toured extensively with the Nuyorican Poet’s Café thought the U.S., Europe and Australia. She is currently working on a book of fiction entitled Lone Dancer Underground and a newly commissioned play for the McCarter Theater Center entitled Yellowman. This fall, she began a year-long NEA/TCG theater residency program at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut. She has toured the U.S. performing an evening of excerpts from her solo shows entitled Leftover Life To Kill. Her most recent work, The Gimmick, was originally created and directed by Peter Askin in 1997, and developed in part with support from the Sundance Theater Laboratory. It was presented at the Aspen Comedy Festival later that year, and was first produced in February 1998 at the McCarter Theater. The play was subsequently performed at Long Wharf Theater and made its New York debut in April 1999 at New York Theater Workshop. The text of The Gimmick appeared in the October issue of American Theater Magazine. Viking Press will soon publish The Gimmick along with Beauty’s Daughter and Monster as a trade paperback anthology.
Grace Paley, the first recipient of the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit, was born in the Bronx in 1922. She is the author of three highly acclaimed collections of short fiction--The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985)--as well as three collections of poetry, including Leaning Forward, also published in 1985. Ms. Paley has taught at Columbia and Syracuse Universities, and currently teaches both at City College of New York, where she is writer-in-residence, and Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught creative writing and literature for eighteen years. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1961, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966, and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970. She is a member of the Executive Board of P.E.N. Actively involved in anti-war, feminist and anti-nuclear movements, Ms. Paley has been a member of the War Resisters' League, Resist, and Women's Pentagon Action, and was one of the founders of the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961; she regards herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." Ms. Paley has two children and one grandchild, and divides her time between New York City and Thetford Hill, Vermont. In spring 1987, Ms. Paley was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature.
Native New Yorker Marie Ponsot was born in 1921. She has published numerous works, including Springing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The GreenDark (1988); Admit Impediment (1981); and True Minds (1957). When asked why poetry matters, Ponsot replied: "There's a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief, that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us." Ponsot, who also translates books from the French, has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, and New York University. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. Marie Ponsot teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City.
Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda and a recently completed novel manuscript, The Fullness of Everything. Her awards include the Bruce Rossley Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction, PEN New England Discovery Award, and the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers' Award. Powell has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Wellesley College, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Graduate Writing Program at the University of Houston, and the Low Residency Program at Queens University in Charlotte. Powell lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Born and raised in Canada, David Rakoff is the author of the book Fraud (Doubleday hardcover; Broadway paperback). A regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and Public Radio International's This American Life, his writing has also appeared in GQ, Salon, Details, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Wired, New York Magazine, and The New York Observer, among others. He has appeared on "The Late Show with David letterman," "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," and "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." As an actor and director, he has worked with Amy and David Sedaris on the plays Stitches, One Woman Shoe, The Little Freida Mysteries, and The Book of Liz. He directed Jail Babes by The Dueling Bankheads at La Mama, E.T.C., and Mike Albo's one-man show, Spray, at P.S. 122 in New York, appeared in Cheryl Dunyé’s film The Watermelon Woman, and has portrayed Lance Loud on stage, Vladimir Mayakovsky on public television, and Sigmund Freud in the window of Barney's department store. He lives in New York City, and has done so since 1982.
Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry--Plot, The End of the Alphabet, and Nothing in Nature is Private--and, most recently, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. She is co-editor, with Goddard MFA in Creative Writing faculty member Juliana Spahr, of American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. She teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston.
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the nonfiction books 7 Tatoos: Memoir In The Flesh (1997) and The Casanova Complex: Compulsive Lovers and Their Women (1988) He has taught writing and literature at the New York University School of Continuing Education, the Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Education, and the School of Visual Arts and is a frequent commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. From Library Journal “In a highly original and absorbing memoir, the short-fiction author Tractenberg struggles to explain the ways of God to man or maybe just to himself. Each tattoo, like Catholicism's seven sacraments, leaves an indelible mark on Tractenberg, which he uses to trace his life from early rebelliousness in the 1960s, through drug addiction on New York's Lower East Side, to an attempt at atonement with parents, lovers, and himself. Tractenberg views God as a Mafia capo di tutti capi, a supreme being with a ‘trigger finger...as itchy as Dirty Harry's.’ Yet, for all its irreverence, his memoir records a serious spiritual quest, a search for answers to questions at the heart of the world's major religions: the nature of God, the cause of suffering, and the meaning of life itself. Highly recommended.”
Jean Valentine is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Cradle of the Real Life (Wesleyan, 2000). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, The Graduate Writing Program at NYU, and The 92nd St. Y, and lives in New York City. A list of recent books: Home.Deep.Blue, alicejamesbooks; The River at Wolf, alicejamesbooks; and Growing Darkness, Growing Light, Carnegie Mellon.
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of a number of books for children, young adults and adults including If You Come Softly, I Hadn’t Meant To Tell You This, Autobiography of A Family Photo, From The Notebooks of Melanin Sun, and The Other Side. She is the recipient of two Coretta Scott King Honors, two Jane Addams Peace Awards, three Lambda Literary Awards, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, a Granta Best Writer Under Forty Award, and a number of American Library Association Best Book Awards. Jacqueline teaches creative writing in the Graduate Program at City College and to young people from underserved communities at the National Book Foundation’s Summer Writing Camp. |
Mark Doty - reading at the Fall 2008 residency
Paul Lisicky - reading at the Fall 2008 residency 
Chris Abani 
Julia Alvarez
Russell Banks
Marilyn Chin
Mary Gaitskill
Thomas Glave
David Greenspan
James Lecesne
Dorianne Laux
Patricia Marx
Tracie Morris
Walter Mosley
Dael Orlandersmith
Grace Paley
Marie Ponsot
Patricia Powell
David Rakoff
Claudia Rankine
Peter Trachtenberg
Jean Valentine
Jacqueline Woodson