Vermont Studio Center

In June, VSC was lucky to have two additional writers visit on residency for a week, actor/writer/activist Alan Cumming and poet/musician/editor Matt Hart. They joined a wickedly talented group to conclude a great night’s resident reading on June 23, 2015. Alan shared an essay he worked on while VSC and Matt read a series of recent poems. Alan Cumming is a Tony and Olivier award winning theatre ac...

A. H. Jerriod Avant was the Callaloo Fellow in residency at Vermont Studio Center in June 2015. This recording blends two readings he did during his stay at VSC: the first, in the Mason House library, serves as a quiet introduction or segue into his second public reading in the Lecture Hall. Jerriod was born in Longtown, MS. A graduate of Jackson State University, he has earned M.FA. degrees from...

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997) and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987)...

Nandi Comer gave a public reading as the culmination of her year-long residency as a staff artist and Writing Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center. Nandi received a joint MFA/MA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, and Callaloo. She is the winner of Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 R...

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawr...

Edward Hirsch has published eight collections of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; his second, Wild Gratitude (1986) won the award in 1987. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the...

Edward Hirsch has published eight collections of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. His first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; his second, Wild Gratitude (1986) won the award in 1987. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the...

Brian Teare has published four full-length books: The Room Where I was Born, Sight Map, The Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses. He has also published seven chapbooks: Pilgrim, Transcendental Grammar Crown, Paradise Was Typeset, Helplessness, Black Sun Crown, and Sore Eros. Teare is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has received poetry fellowships from the Nationa...

Phillip Lopate is the author of several collections of essays, novels, novellas, poetry collections, scholarly works, biography, and writings on the craft of nonfiction and teaching. His essays, fiction, poetry, film, and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories (1974), The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogu...

Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia. Teeth was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award and Kingdom Animalia won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Girmay is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Founda...

Stephen Narain (January/February 2015) shares the opening of his novel-in-progress. Stephen is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he won the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. In 2012, he was selected by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest for the festival's New Talent Showcase, spotlighting the best emerging Caribbean writers. His stories and essays have app...

Leah Hampton is a fiction writer from North Carolina who attended VSC in December 2014. Here, she reads from the opening scene of "Dollywood," a short story about a woman hoping for a chance to talk to Dolly Parton.

Sio San Un is a poet and writer native to Macau. She graduated from Peking University and the University of Toronto and has won several writing prizes, including the New Star’s People’s Literature Prize of Poetry and the Macao Literature Prize. Her works can be found in journals throughout Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. Jeremy Tiang is a translator located in Brooklyn, NY. He has tr...

Patrick Rosal is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Boneshepherds (2011), which was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets; My American Kundiman (2006); Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003); and Brooklyn Antediluvian (forthcoming in 2016). His poems and essays have been published widely in journals a...

December 2014 resident, Morgan Willis, is a novelist, editor, activist and strategic consultant who currently resides in Detroit, Michigan. Listen to Morgan read from a current work in progress, "Politics from Nowhere."

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two story collections and a novel, THREATS, a nominee for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.

Brian Holton is a poet & prize-winning translator from Scotland. He has published numerous translations, including Jade Ladder: A Bloodaxe Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (UK 2012) and several volumes of the work of poet Yang Lian (Lee Valley Poems (UK 2009), Pisces Rising (UK 2008), Sailor’s Home (UK, 2005), Concentric Circles (UK 2005), and Notes of a Blissful Ghost: Selected Poems (Hon...

Hear October 2014 resident Sharon Gelman reads from the opening of her novel (currently titled Exile). Gelman is an essayist, author, speechwriter, and activist who is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson. Her work has appeared in Tutu, The Authorized Portrait (HarperCollins, 2011), Essence.com (December 2010), and Tutu as I Knew Him. (Umuzi-Random House, 2006).

Alice Notley is the author of more than twenty books of poetry including The Descent of Alette and Mysteries of Small Houses. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the L.A. Times Book Award for Poetry. In 2001, she received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award. Born in Arizona, Notley grew up in Californi...

Yi Sha was born in 1966 in Chengdu, and moved with his family at the age of two to the central Chinese city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. He published his first poems while still at school, studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University, and became a noted figure among China’s university student poets. He has worked on literary magazines, as a TV presenter and independent publisher, and is now an as...

Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of E...

Our fifth Cave Canem Fellow, Makalani Bandele, reads from his invented form, the etude. Bandele's work appears or is forthcoming in The New Sound, Barely South Review, and Red Holler: Contemporary Appalachian Literature.

Michael Hofmann (b. 1957) is a German-born poet and translator. He has published six books of poetry: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona (1993), Approximately Nowhere (1999), and Selected Poems (2009). With James Lasdun, he edited the influential anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994). A selection of his critici...

Peter Stamm a Swiss novelist, short-story writer, and radio dramatist joined German-born poet and translator, Michael Hofmann, to present to the VSC community about their experiences with literary translation. Stamm worked as an accountant for nearly a decade before becoming a writer. His sparse writing style has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann. Michael Hofmann has translated some...

Ross Gay's books of poetry are Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and the forthcoming Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. He is also co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens. He is an editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue, in addition to being an editor with the online sports magazine, Some Call It Ballin'. He was a 2013 Guggenheim fellow.