Visiting Professionals Series

In addition to the publishing panels offered at each residency, the MFA in Creative Writing Program has recently begun inviting industry professionals to share their expertise with students and to offer tools and resources to help students with career development issues. Visiting industry professionals have included agents, editors, producers, publishers, and literary managers.

Christine Vachon - Appearing at the Spring 2012 Port Townsend, Washington Residency - 2/22/12 (with Todd Haynes)

Christine Vachon is an American movie producer who, along with partner Pamela Koffler, founded indie powerhouse Killer Films in 1995. The company has produced a number of the most acclaimed American independent films over the past two decades including Far from Heaven (nominated for four Academy Awards), Boys Don’t Cry (Academy Award winner), One Hour Photo, Kids, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Happiness, Velvet Goldmine, Safe, I Shot Andy Worhol, Camp, Swoon and I’m Not There (Academy Award nominated) ). Most recently, Christine executive produced Todd Haynes’ five episode HBO mini series Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce. Killer’s movies have received multiple awards and nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Emmy Awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Independent Spirit Awards. On the occasion of Killer’s 10th anniversary in 2005, the company was feted with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. For her work on Far from Heaven, Christine was honored by the New York Film Critics Circle, and received the Producer of the Year Award from the National Board of Review. Christine is the author of two books: A Killer Life: How An Independent Producer Survives Deals And Disasters In Hollywood And Beyond (Simon and Schuster, 2006); and Shooting To Kill: How An Independent Producer Blasts Through The Barriers To Make Movies That Matter (Avon, 1998). Both books were Los Angeles Times bestsellers.

Richard Nash - Appearing at the Fall 2011 Plainfield, Vermont Residency

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur, presently launching Cursor, a platform that will power the world’s next 50,000 independent publishers, the first of which, Red Lemonade, launched in May 2011. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. Books he edited and published landed on bestseller lists from the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times; on Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times; twice on the cover of the New York Times Book Review; the last book he edited there, Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, was selected as a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2006, Publishers Weekly picked him as one of the ten editors to watch in the coming decade. Last year the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing.

Christine Vachon - Appearing at the Fall 2011 Plainfield, Vermont Residency

Betsy Amster

Betsy Amster is president of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises, a literary agency in Portland. Before opening her agency in 1992, she spent ten years as an editor at Pantheon and Vintage. She has been described in the L.A. Times as “a dogged prospector of...literary talent” and celebrated in a profile in the American Society of Journalists and Authors newsletter for her “no-nonsense style and whimsical sense of humor.” Her clients include MacArthur fellow and urban farmer Will Allen, author of The Good Food Revolution (forthcoming from Gotham); psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of the New York Times bestseller The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and The Blessing of a B Minus (Scribner); María Amparo Escandón, author of the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Esperanza’s Box of Saints (Scribner) and Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co. (Crown); Margaret Leslie Davis, author of Mona Lisa in Camelot: How Jacqueline Kennedy and DaVinci's Masterpiece Charmed and Captivated a Nation (Da Capo; excerpted in Vanity Fair); and many other novelists, journalists, and experts.

Joseph Bednarik

Joseph Bednarik is the marketing director at Copper Canyon Press and a regular book reviewer for The Oregonian newspaper.

Susan Jonas

Susan Jonas is a relentless dramaturg, by day masquerading as a civil servant or arts analyst in the Theatre Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, where she apologizes for not being able to give bigger grants to worthy artistic organizations. She also teaches at whatever university will have her-- most recently New York University, and in previous years Princeton University, Connecticut College, Brooklyn College, S.U.N.Y. Purchase, etc. ad nauseum. She has written for various theatre periodicals, including American Theatre and Theatre, and co-authored the internationally read Report on the Status of Women in Theatre, as well as editing Dramaturgy and American Theater, the standard text in the subject in this and several other countries. She has worked as a resident dramaturg for The Acting Company, Classic Stage Company and Rushmore Theater Festival, and freelanced for many other New York and regional theatres. Her adaptations and translations have been performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Williamstown Theatre Festival and toured nationally with the Lincoln Center Institute and The Acting Company among other companies. She was the Managing Director of the Ensemble Studio Theater and the Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Knickerbocker Theatre Festival which produced the work of Paul Selig, among other now celebrated playwrights. Dr. Jonas has also worked in film development for a variety of studios and agencies. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University and her M.F.A. and D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama. She is currently working on a really great secret project.

Betsy Lerner

Betsy Lerner is a literary agent with Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. Previously, she worked as an editor at major trade publishers including Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin and finally as Executive Editor at Doubleday. Lerner was been the recipient of a Tony Godwin Publishing Prize, the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of PEN's Emerging Writers in 1987. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is the author of Food & Loathing and The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers.

PJ Mark

PJ Mark is an agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates. He has worked in the publishing industry for sixteen years, as an international book scout, a journalist covering the book publishing industry, and as a literary agent since 2002. He is most interested in literary fiction and narrative non-fiction. Representative clients include Dinaw Mengestu, Samantha Hunt, Josh Weil, Ed Park, Sarah Manguo, Kevin Moffett, Andrew Rice, Abrahm Lustgarten, Maggie Nelson, Amy Fusselman, Ryan Boudinot and Craig Thompson. Upcoming titles include How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu, Three Delays by Charlie Smith, Meeks by Julia Holmes, You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin, Take Me Home by Brian Leung, and There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From by Bryan Charles. His authors have: been honored three times as “5 Under 35” writers by the National Book Award Foundation; been named a “20 Under 40” author by The New Yorker; received the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix du Premier Roman, the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction, The Rome Prize, The Narrative Prize, The Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism; been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Young Lions Award, the John Sargent Award for First Novel, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award; been named a TIME magazine book of the year, a Top 10 Cultural Moment of the Decade by The Atlantic; received Lannan Foundation fellowships, the MacArthur Foundation Grant, Fulbright fellowships; been published in The New Yorker, Granta, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Harper's, and elsewhere.

Amy Scholder

Amy Scholder has been editing literary and political book for over twenty years. She became Editorial Director of the Feminist Press in September 2008, where she has acquired books by Haifa Zangana, Ann Jones, Karen Finley, Josh MacPhee, Elizabeth Streb, Laura Whitehorn, Safiya Bukhari, Darina al-Joundi, Virginie Despentes, Judith Halberstam, Barbara Hammer, and more. Previously, she has been Editor-in-Chief at Seven Stories Press, US Publisher of Verso, and has worked with many great literary and cultural figures, such as Elfriede Jelinek, Ani DiFranco, Coco Fusco, June Jordan, Sapphire, Laura Flanders, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Joni Mitchell.

Linda Villarosa

Linda Villarosa is a freelance writer and editor. Formerly, she edited the health pages for the New York Times, where she redesigned and expanded health coverage for Science Times and for the newspaper at large. Linda was also both the executive editor and senior health editor of Essence Magazine, where she wrote or edited a number of award-winning articles. Earlier this year, she sat in as the magazine’s acting editor-in-chief for four months. As a reporter, Linda has written hundreds of articles for the Times, several of which ran on the newspaper’s front page. She has also contributed articles, profiles and reviews to a number of national publications, including Glamour, Health, Latina, the New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, Vibe and Woman’s Day. She has won awards from several organizations, specifically The Arthur Ashe Institute, the American Medical Writers Association, Lincoln University, the New York Association of Black Journalists and the National Women’s Political Caucus. Linda has also provided editorial consulting to a number of companies and organizations. For American Express Publishing, she conceived and launched a newsletter for television host Dr. Phil, focusing on mental and emotional health. For the Kaiser Family Foundation, she has trained journalists from around the world to better cover the international HIV/AIDS epidemic. Linda is the author of Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. A Blackboard Bestseller, there are more than 200,000 copies in print. She is the coauthor of both Finding Our Way: The Teen Girls’ Survival Guide and The Black Parenting Book. She has also worked behind the scenes as a “book doctor,” helping other authors complete proposals and package and write their books. A graduate of the University of Colorado, Linda also spent a year at the Harvard School of Public Health as a journalism fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Michael Wiegers

Michael Wiegers is the Executive Editor of Copper Canyon Press and has worked in Literary publishing for nearly two decades. He has edited books by Ted Kooser, W.S. Merwin, Ruth Stone, C.D. Wright, Alberto Ríos, Karen Tei Yamashita and many others. His own books include, Reversible Monuments and This Art.