Vermont Studio Center

Sydney Lea is author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Here (Four Way Books, 2019). A former Vermont Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer finalist, he has also published a novel, a collection of literary criticism, and four volumes of personal essays. His collaborative work with former Delaware Laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, is now available, and his newer li...

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. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best A...

Jennifer Elise Foerster earned her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer teaches at the Institute of American I...

Bushra Rehman is a poet, novelist and cultural activist. Her novel Corona, a dark comedy about being Muslim American, was noted by Poets & Writers among the Best Debut Fiction of 2013. Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. She has served as a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Urban Word NYC, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her...

Heid E. Erdrich is author and editor of eight books, including the poetry collection Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. Heid edited New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press and co-edited Sister Nations, an anthology of Native American women’s writings. Her non-fiction memoir-in-recipes, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes was a 2014 City Pages Top Foo...

Sue Halpern is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. Halpern is the author of seven books, most recently, Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her book Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly was made into an Emmy-nominated film. Halpern has written on science, technology and social issues for The N...

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001)—a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök is one of the earliest founders of Conceptualism (the poetic school of avant-garde writing made famous, in part, by the activities of Kenneth Goldsmith). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’...

SARAH AUDSLEY has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Recent work can be found in Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Memorious, Scoundrel Time, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as the Staff Ar...

Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River--named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant--and All Back Full; and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice Low-Res MFA Program at Pine Manor College. Visit him at www.robertlopez.net.

Akiko Busch is the author of Geography of Home, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, Nine Ways to Cross a River, and The Incidental Steward. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays about design, culture, and nature have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She has taught at the University of Hartford and Benni...

Juliana Spahr's most recent book of poems is That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015). In addition to many volumes of poetry, she has written criticism and edited several poetry anthologies and collections of essays. Her Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in fall 2018. Spahr is on the English faculty at Mills College...

D. A. Powell's books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, Powell has taught at Columbia, Stanford, University of Iowa, Davidson College and University of San Francisco. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Book Critics Ci...

Noy Holland is the recipient of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story “Tally” was included in Best American Short Stories, and read by Suzzy Roche at Symphony Space in New York City. Her books include I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories; the novel Bird; and three collections of short fiction and novella...

Ralph Angel’s latest collection, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also has published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo...

Rosa Alcalá has published three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE, and two edited collections, Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, and Cecilia Vicuña: New & Selected Poems, which also include her translations. A runner-up for a PEN Translation Award, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Fundación Valparaiso....

Krista is usually on the other side of the microphone, but here she's the one answering questions. If you're curious about podcasting, or guests or themes of On Being, or Krista's thoughts on life and writing, listen in. She also shares a bit about her book in process. She's published two New York Times bestselling books: Einstein's God and Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Liv...

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His debut novel, The Fishermen (2015) was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize 2015. It has been translated into 26 languages and is being adapted into a stage play. The novel was the winner of the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for Debut Literary Work, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His work h...

Dan Chiasson is the author of five books of poetry: Must We Mean What We Say: A Poem in Four Phases (forthcoming, Alfred A. Knopf), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), and The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Chiasson is the poetry critic for The New Yorker. In 2007, he p...

Rosanna Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Ar...

Douglas Trevor is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He is currently serving as Director of the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Doug is the author, most recently, of the short story collection The Book of Wonders. His novel Girls I Know was the recipient of the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize. His first short story collection, The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, wo...

Kyoko Mori is the author of three nonfiction books, The Dream of Water, Polite Lies, Yarn, and four novels, Shizuko’s Daughter, One Bird, Stone Field, True Arrow, Barn Cat. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harvard Review, Fourth Genre, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, Conjunctions, The Best American Essays, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches in George Mason University’s MFA...

Maud Casey is the author of three novels, most recently The Man Who Walked Away; and a short story collection, Drastic. 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. Her nonfiction book, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions was recently published by Graywolf Press....

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of Heaven, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, and The Ground: Poems, for which he received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic,...

Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the...

W. S. Di Piero is the author of eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Tombo. Winner of the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared frequently in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Threepenny Review, and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and other periodicals. Di Piero has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowshi...