Visiting Writers Series - Port Townsend, WashingtonOne 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. Below are profiles of recent and upcoming visiting writers to the Port Townsend, Washington residencies.
Joan Larkin’s latest book, My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press), received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times has called Larkin’s voice “unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed…. This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.” Larkin’s previous books include Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana’s Love Poems (co-translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River, winner of the Lambda Award for poetry. Larkin co-founded the independent press Out & Out Books as part of the feminist literary explosion of the 1970s and co-edited the groundbreaking anthologies Amazon Poetry, Lesbian Poetry with Elly Bulkin, and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time with Carl Morse. Her anthology A Woman Like That was nominated for Publishing Triangle and Lambda awards for nonfiction in 2000. Among other awards, Larkin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing includes two books of daily meditations in the Hazelden recovery series, If You Want What We Have and Glad Day. Now in her fourth decade of teaching writing, she will join the faculty of Drew University’s MFA program in poetry and translation in January. Poet and critic David Bergman has written, “There are few poets in America who can combine Joan Larkin’s formal mastery with her emotional intensity, and so it has been something of a mystery to me why she’s not better known or more widely valued as one of the finest poets in America.”
Kim Addonizio is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently What Is This Thing Called Love (W.W. Norton). Her novel, Little Beauties, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. With Dorianne Laux, she co-authored The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton). She has received numerous awards for her poetry and fiction, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize.
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working class storyteller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian college on a National Merit Scholarship and in 1979, studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research. An award winning editor for Quest, Conditions, and Outlook—early feminist and Lesbian & Gay journals, Allison's chapbook of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, was published with Long Haul Press in 1983. Her short story collection Trash (1988) was published by Firebrand Books. Trash won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change." However, she admits, she would never have begun to publish her stories "if she hadn't gotten over her prejudices, and started talking to her mother and sisters again." Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, (1992) a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a best seller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Cavedweller (1998) became a national bestseller, NY Times Notable book of the year, finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. Adapted for the stage by Kate Moira Ryan, the play was directed by Michael Greif, and featured music by Hedwig composer, Stephen Trask. In 2003, Lisa Cholendenko directed a movie version featuring Krya Sedwick. The expanded edition of Trash (2002) included the prize winning short story, "Compassion" selected for both Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best New Stories from the South 2003. Dorothy Allison will be writer in residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, spring, 2008. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Riverhead. For more information, visit Dorothy Allison's web site.
Jane Anderson is a multi-award winning writer and director who has created some of the most thought-provoking television, theater, and film in the last decade. Most recently, she wrote and directed the feature film, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (starring Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson). She wrote and directed Normal for HBO, which starred Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson, and garnered six Emmy nominations (including best writing, directing and best made-for-TV film), three Golden Globe nominations, and Director’s Guild and Writer’s Guild nominations for best directing and writing. She wrote HBO’s ground-breaking The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom for which she received an Emmy, a Penn Award, and Writers Guild Award for best teleplay. Her other television films include When Billie Beat Bobby (starring Holly Hunter and Ron Silver) and The Baby Dance (starring Laura Dern and Stockard Channing), for which she received a Peabody Award, a Golden Globe nomination, and three Emmy nominations for best writing, directing and made-for-TV film. She wrote and directed the first segment of If These Walls Could Talk II, which starred Vanessa Redgrave and earned her an Emmy nomination for best writing. Her other screenwriting credits include: How to Make an American Quilt and It Could Happen To You Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway and in theaters around the country, including Actors Theater of Louisville, the McCarter Theater, Long Wharf, ACT, the Geffen Theater, and The Pasadena Playhouse. Her published plays include: Looking for Normal, The Baby Dance, Defying Gravity, Smart Choices for the New Century and numerous short plays including Lynette at 3 a.m., and The Last Time We Saw Her. Ms. Anderson resides in Los Angeles with her spouse Tess Ayers and their son, Raphael.
Rebecca Brown's tenth book of prose, The Last Time I Saw You will be available from City Lights in January, 2006. Some of Rebecca’s other books include The End of Youth (City Lights), Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary (University of Wisconsin Press), The Gifts of the Body, The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Haunted House, The Children's Crusade, and What Keeps Me Here. Rebecca’s work has been awarded the Boston Book Review Award for fiction, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and a Washington State Governor's Award. It has been widely anthologized, including stories in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Rebecca co-edited, with Robert Corbett, Experimental Theology, an anthology that contains poetry, fiction, essays, academic stuff and theater. In 2005, she was appointed the Creative Director of Literary Programs at Centrum, an arts center in Port Townsend, Washington. Recently, Rebecca has been collaborating with artists in different disciplines. She is working with Better Biscuit Dance Company, for whom she is writing a liberetto--a dance opera that premiered in 2005. Also in 2005, her first two-act play, The Toaster, premiered at the New City Theater in Seattle. Her book The Terrible Girls was adapted for theater by About Face Theater in Chicago and performed there in 2001. The Los Angeles New Short Fiction Series adapted four pieces from The End of Youth for performance in November 2003. Rebecca also does a series of irreverent public talks sponsored by the Seattle Opera that offer pop culture/feminist/literary and goofy analysis of opera. With painter Nancy Kiefer, she is doing a book of text and image called Woman in Ill Fitting Wig. Rebecca is also a faculty member in the Plainfield, VT residency option of Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing Program.
George Evans is the author of five books of poetry published in the US and England, including his most recent, The New World (Curbstone Press), and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House Press), shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He also translated The Violent Foam: New & Selected Poems (Curbstone Press), by Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora, co-translated The Time Tree: Selected Poems of Huu Thinh (Curbstone Press) from Vietnamese, and edited the two volume scholarly work Charles Olson & Cid Corman: Complete Correspondence, 1950 1964 (National Poetry Foundation: University of Maine). His poetry, fiction, essays, and translations have been published in literary magazines throughout the US, including Conjunctions, DoubleTake, Exquisite Corpse, Grand Street, Manoa, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, New Letters, Ploughshares, Poetry, Southwest Review, and Sulfur. His work has also been published (in English and translation) in Australia, England, France, Ireland, Japan, Nicaragua, and Viet Nam. Twice the featured poet in Cid Corman’s seminal literary magazine Origin, his work is represented in a number of major anthologies, including the Norton anthologies Postmodern American Poetry, Against Forgetting, the forthcoming Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World, and in The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers (Curbstone Press). An antiwar activist veteran of the Viet Nam American War, he is one of the subjects of a forthcoming multi segment radio series addressing the impact of war on culture and society, produced for National Public Radio (NPR) by the Center for Emerging Media at WYPR in Baltimore. George’s grants and awards include a 2003 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, two US National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowships, a Literature Fellowship for Poetry from the California Arts Council, an earlier Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, and a Monbusho Fellowship and residency from the Japanese Ministry of Education for the study of Japanese literature and culture—he lived in Japan for over two years. He has also been the recipient of writing residencies from the Lannan Foundation’s Residency Program (Marfa, Texas), and the Heinrich Böll Cottage (Achill Island, Ireland). George was the founder and editor of Streetfare Journal, a non profit public art and literature project which published and displayed contemporary poetry and photography posters on 14,000 buses to an audience of 10 million readers in 15 US cities until 2000. Established in 1984, Streetfare Journal received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, the Lannan Foundation, The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the Australian Arts Council, and other private foundations, under the corporate sponsorship of New York based Transportation Displays Incorporated (TDI). A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University (M.A., Writing Seminars/English), and Carnegie Mellon University (B.A., English), George has traveled extensively in the US and abroad, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora. For the past several years George has taught writing classes at a number of universities and colleges, most recently as a lecturer for the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been a member of the faculty for summer writing workshop programs at Naropa University (Boulder), and the William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts (Boston).
Frances McCue, artistic director and co-founder of Richard Hugo House, is a poet, art reviewer, essayist, teacher and an arts instigator. Frances was a winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize in 1992, and her book, The Stenographer’s Breakfast, was published by Beacon Press. She has published in magazines from MS to Poetry Northwest. Frances has an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is an Adjunct Professor of Education at Seattle University, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington, a freelance art reviewer for The Seattle Times and she was an Echoing Green Fellow from 1998-2002. She has won grants from Hedgebrook, Artist Trust and 4 Culture. Frances is interested in poets who are turning to prose projects and would love to talk more about that.
Rick Moody's first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown & Co. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries, and a film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997. His newest novel is entitled The Diviners. Right Livelihoods, a novella, was published in 2007. A collection of short fiction, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, was also published by Little, Brown & Co. in August 1995. The title story was the winner of the 1994 Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review. Moody's third novel, Purple America, was published in April 1997. Foreign editions have appeared widely. An anthology, edited with Darcey Steinke, Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, also appeared in November 1997. In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2001, he published a collection of short fiction, Demonology, also published in Spain, France, Brazil, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In May of 2002, Little, Brown & Co issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. His short fiction and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Stories 2001, Best American Essays 2004, Year's Best Science Fiction #9, and, multiply, in the Pushcart Prize anthology. His radio pieces have appeared on The Next Big Thing and at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. His album Rick Moody and One Ring Zero was released in 2004, and an album by The Wingdale Community Singers was released in 2005. Moody is a member of the board of directors of the Corporation of Yaddo. He is the secretary of the PEN American Center, and he co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New School for Social Research. Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Walter Mosley is the critically acclaimed author of twenty-three books. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Many readers first discovered Walter’s writing in the Easy Rawlins mystery series. The first book in the series, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Jennifer Beals. In addition to his successful mysteries, Walter’s books span the genres of literary fiction, young adult fiction, science fiction and nonfiction. Both his fiction and nonfiction appear in a wide array of publications including The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Los Angeles Times Magazine and The Nation. Walter’s decisions as a businessman and writer reflect his commitment to empowerment and building community. He chose the small independent press, Black Classic Press, to publish the prequel to the Easy Rawlins series, Gone Fishin’. He felt it was important “to create a model that other writers, black or not, can look at to see that it’s possible to publish a book successfully outside mainstream publishing in New York.” Black Classic Press also published What Next, part political essay, part handbook for community action that examines the singular kinds of contributions and patterns of belief and action African Americans can add to any approach towards world peace. Life out of Context (Nation Books) moves from Walter’s personal experience of cultural dislocation to his call for African-Americans creation of a new political party. For more on Walter Mosley, visit his website.
Jose Rivera is a recipient of two OBIE Awards for Playwriting -- for Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, both produced at The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. His screenplay, The Motorcycle Diaries, (directed by Walter Salles) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, and a Writers Guild Award. The screenplay received Spain’s Goya Award and Argentina’s top award for screenwriting. Other honors include the Imagen Foundation’s 2005 Norman Lear Writing Award, a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Playwriting, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant.
|
Joan Larkin - Reading at the Fall 2008 Residency 
Kim Addonizio
Dorothy Allison
Jane Anderson
Rebecca Brown
George Evans
Frances McCue
Rick Moody 
Walter Mosley
Jose Rivera