Vermont Studio Center

V. V. Ganeshananthan's debut novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and chosen as one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Atlantic Monthly, among others. A recipient of fellowships from the Nation...

Ross Gay is the author of three books: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and it was nominated for an NAAC...

Gladys Swan has published four novels, including "Carnival for the Gods" (Vintage Contemporaries Series) and "Ghost Dance--A Play of Voices" (LSU Press, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), which was reprinted as part of "A New Mexico Trilogy" (published by Serving House Books). "A New Mexico Trilogy" also contains "A Dark Gamble," and "Ancestors." Additionally, she has published eight collectio...

Hester Kaplan is the author of the story collections The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Unravished, and the novels Kinship Theory and The Tell. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories series. She is the recipient of an NEA, the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonf...

Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books and a poetry chapbook. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2006 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program. His latest book of poetry, Unidentified Sighing Objects, (Cavan...

Howard A. Norman is an American award­-winning writer and educator. Most of his short stories and novels are set in Canada's Maritime Provinces. He has written several translations of Algonquin, Cree, and Inuit folklore. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Norman is a three-­time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1...

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of SO MUCH SYNTH (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); OUR ANDROMEDA (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), which was a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013"; HUMAN DARK WITH SUGAR (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;...

Jane Shore’s six books of poems have garnered many prizes including the 1977 Juniper Prize, the 1986 Lamont Prize, and a 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. A YES-OR-NO ANSWER, (2008) won the 2010 Poets Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, she was also awarded two grants from the NEA. Widely anthologized, her poems appeared in The...

Jensen Beach is the author of the short story collection Swallowed by the Cold, as well as a previous collection of stories. His work has appeared in A Public Space, the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College and the MFA Program in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Vermont with his family.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). A Cave Canem Fellow and winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, she teaches in the Drew University MFA...

Curtis Bauer is the author of two poetry collections, most recently The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013). He is also a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish; his publications include the full-length poetry collections Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Alice James Books, 2014) and From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz (Vaso Roto Ediciones, 2015). He is the...

Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has taught in numerous writing programs including Emerson College, Boston University, Bowdoin College and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and is the author of a collection of stories and seven novels, including EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE. THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET won the L.L.Winship/PEN New England award and THE FLIGHT O...

Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer, and Conjunctions. Her honors and awards include four Pus...

Major Jackson is the author of four collections of poetry, including Roll Deep, which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award; Holding Company; Hoops; and Leaving Saturn , which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Jackson has published poems, essays, and book reviews in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares...

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award and the Dorset Prize. He won a 2001 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. He edited an anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of Internati...

Michelle Latiolais is Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of the novel Even Now, which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her second novel, A Proper Knowledge, was published in 2008 by Bellevue Literary Press. She has published writing in three anthologies: Absolute Disaster, Women On The Edge: Writing From Lo...

Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (...

Porochista Khakpour was boron Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She is the author of The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic). Her memoir Sick is forthcoming in 2017. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Bookf...

Patricia Smith is the author of Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with Chicago photographer Michael Abramson; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012) – winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Bobbitt from the Library of Congress; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008) – a finalist for the 20...

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author two poetry collections, In No One's Land and My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer. Her third collection, Dolefully a Rampart Stands, is forthcoming in 2019. She works as the Associate Director of the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College and is on faculty at the New England College Low-Residency MFA. She recently left Vermont for rural Connecticut. Vermont Studio Ce...

Amina Gautier is the author of the short story collections At-­Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. At­-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award, The First Horizon Award, and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Agni, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and...

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and attended Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), won the 2002 New York/New England Award. His second collection, Mixology (Penguin, 2009), was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in...

Evie Shockley is the author of four collections of poetry—including the new black (Wesleyan 2011), winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, and a half­red sea (Carolina Wren Press 2006)—and a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa 2011). Her poetry and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, with recent o...

Jensen Beach is the author of the collection Swallowed by the Cold, as well as a previous collection of stories. His work has appeared in A Public Space, the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College and the MFA Program in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Vermont with his family.

Afaa Michael Weaver (born Michael Schan Weaver, 1951) is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, beginning with Water Song (U Virginia 1985) which was published in the Callaloo poetry series by Charles H. Rowell. Afaa received the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award for The Government of Nature (U Pitt 2013), the second book in his Plum Flower Trilogy, which began with The Plum Flower Dance (U Pitt 20...