Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945, a largely Polish city that became a part of the Soviet Ukraine shortly after his birth. A major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Zagajewski is today one of the most well-known and highly regarded contemporary Polish poets in Europe and the United States. Zagajewski's most recent books in English are Eternal Enemies (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008) and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and Solidarity, Solitude: Essays. When, after September 11, The New Yorker published his poem, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," on its back page—a rare departure from the cartoons and parodies that usually occupy that space—it resonated with many readers. He now spends part of the year in Krakow, the city he lived in during the 1960s and '70s; and he teaches in Chicago.

VSC Reading Series: Adam Zagajewski 9/20/2010

Marilyn Hacker is the author of a dozen collections of poems, including ESSAYS ON DEPARTURE (Carcanet, 2006), DESESPERANTO, (Norton, 2003) and WINTER NUMBERS which received the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. NAMES will be published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2009. She has also published ten collections of translations from the French, including Marie Etienne's KING OF A HUNDRED HORSEMEN (Farrar Strauss and Giroux 2008) which received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize and the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008.

VSC Reading Series: Marilyn Hacker 7/26/2010

Noy Holland’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 Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, New York Tyrant, and Post Road, among others.  She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida.  She serves on the board of directors at FC2.

VSC Reading Series: Noy Holland 11/14/2011

Stephen Dunn is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, including Here and Now, which will be published by Norton in May, 2011. His Different Hours was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Among his many other awards are The Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time these days in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.

VSC Reading Series: Stephen Dunn 4/18/2011

A reading celebrating the publication of From Sorrow’s Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth, edited by Shaun T. Griffin. An acclaimed American poet and critic, Hayden Carruth lived for many years along the Foote Brook in Johnson and wrote some of his most lasting and significant poems about the rural environment and people of northern Vermont. This book launch features readings and reflections by:

Shaun T. Griffin
Geof Hewitt
David Budbill
Baron Wormser
Rose Marie Carruth

VSC Special Event: Celebrating Hayden Carruth 10/29/2013

Howard Norman is the author of three novels including The Museum Guard. His first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were finalists for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Prize, The New England Bookseller's Association Award, 3 fellowships from the NEA, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His translations of Inuit folktales have earned him two Translation Center Awards from Columbia University. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, and lives in VT and Washington, D.C.

VSC Reading Series: Howard Norman 1/9/2014

Resident composer and musician Bill Frisell performed at the Red Mill, showcasing new compositions he'd created while at VSC. Born in Baltimore, Bill Frisell played clarinet throughout his childhood in Denver, Colorado. His interest in guitar began with his exposure to pop music on the radio. Soon, the Chicago Blues became a passion through the work of Otis Rush, B.B. King, Paul Butterfield and Buddy Guy. In high school, he played in bands covering pop and soul classics, James Brown and other dance material. Later, Bill studied music at the University of Northern Colorado before attending Berklee College of Music in Boston where he studied with John Damian, Herb Pomeroy and Michael Gibbs. In 1978, Frisell moved for a year to Belgium where he concentrated on writing music. In this period, he toured with Michael Gibbs and first recorded with German bassist Eberhard Weber. Bill moved to the New York City area in 1979 and stayed until 1989. He now lives in Seattle.

Photo by Monica Frisell.


VSC Special Event: Bill Frisell in the Red Mill 2/27/2014

Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry -- most recently, Previously Owned (2022), and Scale (2017) -- both from Four Way Books. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review.

nathanmcclain.com

Author photo courtesy of Moe Nazemi Photography.

Visiting Writer Reading - Nathan McClain - 2/15/23

Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Talusan has published in Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Boston magazine, The Boston Globe, and other outlets and anthologies, including Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. In 2022, she was awarded fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Brother Thomas Fund. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.

gracetalusan.com

The 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visiting Writer Reading - Grace Talusan 05/17/23

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts, and three novels: The Subject Steve, Home Land and The Ask. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, N+1, The Quarterly, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

VSC Reading Series: Sam Lipsyte 7/10/2014

Nandi Comer is the author of American Family: A Syndrome  (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. She is the Michigan Poet Laureate.

nandicomer.com

The 2023 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visiting Writer Reading - Nandi Comer 08/09/23

Rick Moody is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and, most recently, a collection of essays on music. He is finishing a new novel. He also writes music criticism for Salon and The Rumpus.

VSC Reading Series: Rick Moody 8/7/2014

Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (UGA Press, 2008).  

He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  

Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Terrain.org, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in almost two dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. His poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and on The Slowdown podcast hosted by Tracy K. Smith. A selection of poems from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean.  

He has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

seanhillpoetry.com

Author photo courtesy of Geoff Wyatt.

Visiting Writer Reading - Sean Hill 10/4/23

Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA CW at IAIA. Her memoir WHISKEY TENDER (HarperCollins) was named one of the most anticipated books to watch for in 2024 by Zibby Media with a publication date set for February 27th. She has won fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, A Public Space, and the NY State Summer Writer’s Institute. She earned her MFA in Iowa City, and her writing can be found in Salon, Brevity, LARB, the Best American series, and other places. She comes from the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo and is the editor-in-chief of River Styx Magazine. 

deborahtaffa.com

Visiting Writer Reading - Deborah Taffa 10/25/23

Ricardo Wilson is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books, 2021) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern UP, 2020). An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories was selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award. His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, Northwest Review, The Offing, and Stirring. Ricardo is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America.

ricardoawilson.com

Visiting Writer Reading - Ricardo A. Wilson 11/17/23

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 assistant professor at the Xi’an International Studies University.

Martin Winter is a translator and poet from Vienna, Austria. He has translated several Chinese poets . His translations have  appeared in the Poetry International Festival, South China Morning Post, the Taipei Times and Poetry Sky.

Their joint residency in October 2014 was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of VSC's Chinese Poetry and Translation Residency Fellowships Program.

VSC Reading Series: Yi Sha and Martin Winter 10/5/2014

Miciah Bay Gault is the author of the novel Goodnight Stranger (Park Row, 2019), which was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and selected for Poets & Writers’ First Fiction roundup. Miciah was the 2023 Shane Stevens Fellow in the Novel at Bread Loaf, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Agni, The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, The New York Times Modern Love Column, and other places. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is coordinator of the Vermont Book Award. 

miciahbaygault.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visiting Writer Reading - Miciah Bay Gault 01/11/24

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020), and the forthcoming Silver (FSG, 2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new edition of which is forthcoming from FSG) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. His translations, primarily from Catalan, have appeared widely; including his translation of Salvador Espriu’s classic short-story collection Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Phillips has written on contemporary art for Artforum as well as for David Kordansky Gallery. In 2021, an exhibition inspired by one of Phillips’ poems, “The Beatitudes of Malibu” debuted at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the President of the Board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University, where he earned his doctorate in English Literature, Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He divides his time between New York City and Barcelona with his wife and two daughters.

rowanricardophillips.com

Author photo courtesy of Sue Kwon.

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visiting Writer Reading- Rowan Ricardo Phillips 03/20/24

Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and The Rib King. Her most recent book The Last Suspicious Holdout, a collection of stories, was published in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly and Callaloo among other venues. She is a recipient of a Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida. She currently lives in New Orleans.

ladeehubbard.com

Author photo courtesy of Vilma Samulionyte


The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visting Writer Reading- Ladee Hubbard 02/15/24

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, published by Penguin. Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. They earned their BA in History from Brown University and MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Profess of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

iampaultran.com

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visiting Writer Reading- Paul Tran 04/10/24

Kerrin McCadden was the recipient of the 2022 Herb Lockwood Prize for excellence in the arts in Vermont. She is the author of two poetry collections, most recently American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, 2021), finalist for the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and on The Slowdown. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, The Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. McCadden holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at the Center for Technology, Essex. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.

kerrinmccadden.net
Author photo courtesy of Jess Dewes, 2020.

Visiting Writer Reading- Kerrin McCadden 05/08/24

Jen Soriano (she~they) is a Filipinx writer and movement builder who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. Jen has won the International Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Fugue Prose Prize, and fellowships from Hugo House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen is also an independent scholar and performer, author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry, and co-editor of Closer to Liberation: A Pina/xy Activist Anthology. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Jen is also a co-founder of the cultural democracy institutions, MediaJustice and ReFrame. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen now lives with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea. Her debut book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, is now available from Amistad/HarperCollins. 

jensoriano.net

Photo Credit: Naomi Ishisaka 

The 2024 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Visiting Writer Reading- Jen Soriano 05/23/24

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 and anthologies including The New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Grantland, Brevity, The Beacon Best, and The Best American Poetry. His awards include the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken, for his chapbook Uncommon Denominators, and a 2009 a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines.

Patrick Rosal is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program. Learn more at www.patrickrosal.com

VSC Reading Series: Patrick Rosal 12/15/2014

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 Goetsch (formerly Douglas Goetsch) is the author of Nameless Boy, The Job of Being Everybody and several other volumes of poems. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and numerous other journals and anthologies. Among her honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Donald Murray Prize.

Diana is an experienced and innovative writing teacher who has taught at colleges, conferences and MFA programs, in addition to teaching privately—one-on-one, and group workshops in her New York City apartment. She is also the editor of Jane Street Press, a unique, zero-profit poetry press she founded in 2001.

Please visit her website for further information: http://dianagoetsch.com/

Photograph by Laurie Macfee 2015, VSC

Resident Profile: Diana Goetsch

Nat Schmookler is a writer from Virginia and New Mexico. His work has received support from Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hawthornden Castle, among other institutions. He now serves as the Interviews Editor at The Utopian.

Resident Profile: Nat Schmookler

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 Living.

A Conversation with Krista Tippett of On Being 7/31/19

VSC President Emeritus Gary Clark was born and raised in New Haven county, Connecticut. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English and Drama in 1986, and from the University of Oregon with an MFA in Poetry in 1992. From 1996 to 2014, Gary led the Writers Program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, where he lives with his wife Laura and their three children.  He was a staff artist from 1993 to 1994. His email is gpcjr@mac.com. You can read "The Old Ways" below.

THE OLD WAYS

For awhile I turned to honesty and openness,
but all that happened was the people I loved got tired.
After careful consideration, I have decided  
it is now time to go back to the woods, build a fire, find a rock, 
sit down, and share a poptart with my shadow,
as I used to do, see the flames flickering in my face
as the one place no one knows is there.
There used to be a time, not too, too long ago,
when things that sounded like this were actually like this,
when through a hole in my Carhartts I entered
new nowheres, great beautiful fluids bubbling up out
of the moss at my feet, distance and wind and quiet and dark
and clean and weightless and empty and easy and gone
and all the same thing as me, back then,
back there, where I argued and fought and cheated without fear.
One time, in an orchard sloping down toward a big lake,
arithmetic made sense, and so did leaving.
There was nothing to do, the cold apples were everything,
I drafted a letter made of miles and apologies.
Looking back now on everything, I wish a couple things:
first, that I could understand where things have gone,
and second, that you and I could always go.
Things could be easier, that little bird says, the way
they never were; we could be friends, I could learn to speak,
we could share a soda and pretend we were free
of the old ways, broken free, finally free.

Gary Clark's Album

"The Old Ways" by Gary Clark

Nandi Comer is the author of the American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Northwestern University Press, May, 2020). She is a Cave Canem fellow as well as a Callaloo fellow. She is a 2019 Kresge Artist Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Muzzle, The Offing, and Southern Indiana Review. She was a resident for the first time in May 2010 and most recently, this past year. She was a staff artist August 2014-July 2015. This poem is published in her upcoming book, which you can purchase here: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/content/tapping-out

Social media: @nandicomer (Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter)

"Detroit, Llorona, My Heart, My City" by Nandi Comer

Bethany Ball’s debut novel What to Do About the Solomons with Grove Atlantic was published in 2017. Judy Blume called it “funny, sexy, and smart” and it was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The novel was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Jewish Book Council’s debut novel prize, and the “The Bridge” Book Award.  Ball has been published in The Common, American Literary Review, the Detroit MetroTimes and LitHub, and forthcoming from Zyzzyva.  Her second novel, The Pessimists, is due out in 2021 from Grove Atlantic.

A chapter from The Pessimists by Bethany Ball

Eva Warrick was a resident in November 2019. Eva grew up near Seattle. She graduated with an MFA in painting. She taught visual art for several years and moved to Amsterdam in 2014, where she began writing. Her fiction has been supported by fellowships from Tin House and Yaddo, has appeared in A Public Space and Granta and is forthcoming in The Southern Review. She is represented by Seren Adams at United Agents in London. She’ll attend the Helen Zell Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan and split time between Ann Arbor and Amsterdam. She continues to paint. 

"Natural History" was published in Granta and you can read it here: https://granta.com/natural-history/ 

Find Eva at https://evawarrick.com/

"Natural History" by Eva Warrick

Joy Baglio‘s short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and PANK, among others. She's received fellowships, scholarships, and grants from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Speculative Literature Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and her writing has been recognized by numerous contests and awards, including The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest (Honorable Mention) and the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. She holds an MFA from The New School and teaches writing at Grub Street and at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, which she founded in 2016. She was in residency at VSC during November of 2019, and is currently working on a novel and short story collection.

"Belly of the Beast": http://americanshortfiction.org/new/belly-of-the-beast/ First published in American Short Fiction in November 2019 as a Web Exclusive.

Interview with Joy and ASF editor Erin McReynolds about the piece and the form of flash fiction:
https://americanshortfiction.org/new/web-exclusive-interview-joy-baglio/

"Belly Of The Beast" by Joy Baglio

Linda Dittmar grew up in Israel during its formative years, 1939-1960. Coming to study in the United States, she received her Ph.D from Stanford University and for the next forty years taught literature and film studies at the University of Massachusetts. During that time she also taught at the University of Paris, held two Fulbright grants to India, the latter as Distinguished Chair, and lectured twice at Tel Aviv University. In addition to many articles and book chapters her writing includes the books From Hanoi to Hollywood; The Vietnam War in American Film and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Now Professor Emerita and longtime editorial member of Radical Teacher magazine, she is completing her memoir, “Tracing Homelands,” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing on the war of 1948. A longer version of the current chapter appears in the Bulletin of Harvard University’s Divinity School. Other excerpts were published in Jewish Currents, Nowhere, and Consequence magazines. Linda is particularly grateful for the support of VSC, where she wrote with joy and inspiration in May 2017, May 2019, and September 2019.

A chapter from Tracing Homelands by Linda Dittmar

In January 2020, Gwen enjoyed a blissful month at the Vermont Studio Center, where she worked on a work of creative non-fiction titled The Nine, the true story of nine women who escaped from the Nazis. One of those nine women was her great aunt Helene who first told Gwen her story. The book is scheduled to be published by St. Martin's Press in 2021.

Gwen is an award-winning children’s book author and poet, whose titles include Trail of Stones, The Night Shimmy, Ruth and the Green Book, and The Hiding Game. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous places including The New Republic, New England Review, Kenyon Review, London Sunday Times, and Catapult. She lives in Southern France with her three children and works as the Director at the Brown Foundation Fellowship Program at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, an artist residency program. 

You can follow her work at www.gwenstrauss.com

And can find out more information about the residency program at https://maisondoramaar.org/

An excerpt from The Nine by Gwen Strauss

Cherline Bazile reads "God Hates Black Girls," a chapter from her novel in progress about a family on the brink of eviction. She is a Haitian-American writer from Florida. She received her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. She graduated from Harvard University and had the pleasure of attending Vermont Studio Center in June 2019. Cherline is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and her work has won three Hopwood Awards. You can follow her on Instagram @cherbazile or on Twitter @cherlinebazile.

"God Hates Black Girls" by Cherline Bazile

Founded by artists in 1984, the Vermont Studio Center is an international artists' and writers' residency program in the United States, hosting artists and writers each month from across the country and around the world.

VSC provides studio residencies on an historic 30-building campus along the Gihon River in Johnson, Vermont, a village in the heart of the northern Green Mountains.

Popular tracks by Vermont Studio Center