Vermont Studio Center

Laurie Macfee received an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Sierra Nevada College, and studied in the MFA Fine Arts program at University of South Florida. She received the Redfield Fellowship for Book Arts and is designer and past poetry editor of Sierra Nevada Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio, Blue Lyra Review, Big Bell, Terminus, Brushfire, Halcyon, and the...

Matt Hart is the author of five books of poems: Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N BKS, 2013). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Cincinnati...

Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War and A Reunion of Ghosts. She teaches undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops at the University of Wisconsin, ­Madison, where she is a professor of English and the director of the MFA program in creative writing. She has received grants and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Wisconsin Insti...

Kara van de Graaf is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley University. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom, at www.lightboxpoetry.com. A wandering artist writer who daily meets the world openly with i...

Jane Hirshfield’s most recent, eighth book of poetry is The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), appearing alongside a new book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). Previous books include Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011); After (HarperCollins, 2006), named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Financial Times (UK); and Given Sugar, Giv...

Luce Fellowship recipients, Song Lin and Yu-Han Chao read from their work translating from Chinese to English during their May 2016 VSC residency.

Paulette Livers is the author of Cementville, a Novel (Counterpoint), Winner of Elle Magazine Lettres Prize, and finalist for Center for Fiction's Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and the Kentucky Literary Award. Please visit: www. PauletteLivers.com. Creative Director at Mighty Sword Studio—A Boutique Writing and Design Studio, where writers come to...

Victor LaValle is the author of slapboxing with jesus, a collection of stories, and three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver. His most recent novel, The Devil in Silver, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2012. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He teaches creative writi...

Dustin Parsons’ essays and stories have appeared in Seneca Review, Crab Orchard Review, Normal School, and Indiana Review amongst others. Recent honors for his writing include the American Literary Review fiction prize, The Laurel Review fiction prize, and grants in creative non-fiction from NYFA and the Ohio State Arts Council. He is associate professor of English at The State University of New Y...

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship and residencies from The Civitella di Ranieri and Lannan Foundations, she is also Senior Poetry Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. A deep in...

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (LSU 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (LSU 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook, Songs for the Carry-On (Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and the Miller William...

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as PrizeStories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 20...

Ah-reum Han received her MFA in Fiction from George Mason University, where she was the fiction fellow and won a few prizes. You can (slash will) find her work in Okey-Panky, Fugue, Blunderbuss, and Flyway, among others. She lives and loves in Virginia, where she masquerades as a proposal writer by day.

Tafisha A. Edwards is the author of THE BLOODLET, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Offing, PHANTOM, Bodega Magazine, Fjords Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and other print and online publications. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Jiminéz-Porter Writers’ House, a Cave Canem fellow, and a former educator with the American Poetr...

Noy Holland reads from her novel Bird during the December 2015 residency session at Vermont Studio Center. Noy's collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The...

Rikki Ducornet is the author of nine novels, including Netsuke, Gazelle, and The Fan Maker’s Inquisition; several collections of short fiction, including The One Marvelous Thing, The Word “Desire,” and The Complete Butcher’s Tales; two books of essays, The Deep Zoo and The Monstrous and the Marvelous, and five books of poetry, including The Cult of Seizure, Knife Notebook, and Wild Geraniums. Rikk...

William Brewer was a James Merrill Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in February 2016. He shared six poems at one of the monthly resident readings. William Brewer was born and raised in West Virginia. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, The Nation, A Public Space, and other journals. He has received fellowships f...

Visiting Writer Kwame Dawes shares his work with the VSC community in February 2016. Kwame was born in Ghana in 1962 and spent much of his childhood in Jamaica. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, Impossible Flying, Back of Mount Peace, Hope’s Hospice, Wheels, and Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems. Dawes’ novels include She’s Gone, and Bi...

Simone Muench shares a selection of her poetry as a Visiting Writer at Vermont Studio Center in March 2016. Simone was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas and now lives in Chicago, IL. She is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing, which received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Lampblack & Ash, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Orange Crush; Disappearing Address, co-written...

Three Chinese poets, Tang Siu Wa, Zang Li, and Yang Xiaobin read poems written at Vermont Studio Center during their month-long residency in January 2016, along with their paired translators Jennifer Feeley, Eleanor Goodman, and Canaan Morse, who share their translations of each piece. The group discussed the context of the work, and also held a conversation afterward about poetry and the nature o...

July 2015 resident and Giving Tuesday fellow Lania Knight talks about her writing process at VSC and reads part of her upcoming novel, Remnant. Lania Knight's first book, Thee Cubic Feet, was a finalist for the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction. Her stories, essays, and interviews have been published in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, PANK, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rumpus, Jabberwock...

VSC residents and 2015 Luce Foundation Fellows Yi Mimi and her translator Steve Bradbury read a selection of poems in the Mason House Library. Ye Mimi is a Taiwanese poet and filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Department at Dong Hwa University and the MFA Film Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is the author of two volumes of poetry and has internationally exh...

ZZ Packer shares a short story during a Resident Reading at Vermont Studio Center. She was a resident for the month of August, 2015. ZZ received her BA from Yale University in English Literature, an MA from Johns Hopkins and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the highly acclaimed “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories,” which was a National Book Award 5 Under 35 Winner and a...

Major Jackson is an American poet, professor and the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Hoops (W.W. Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. He is also a recip...

Diana Goetsch speaks in an interview about her current work and practice while at Vermont Studio Center, followed by her reading four poems as part of the Resident Reading night on September 6, 2015. The discussion/introduction was held with Laurie Macfee, Writing Coordinator at VSC, in the Mason House Library a couple days after the evening reading in the Lowe Lecture Hall in Johnson, VT. Diana G...