WORKSHOP FACULTY
(click each poet's link to view their workshop description)
KIM ADDONIZIO is “one of our nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” (San Diego Tribune) Her latest books are Lucifer at the Starlite, a finalist for the Poets Prize and the Northern California Book Award; and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton. Kalima Press recently published her Selected Poems in Arabic. Addonizio’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and the essay. Her collection, Tell Me, was a National Book Award Finalist. Other books include two novels from Simon & Schuster, one of which has been optioned for the screen by Fox Searchlight. Addonizio offers private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online, and often incorporates her love of blues harmonica into her readings. Visit her at www.kimaddonizio.com.
CORNELIUS EADY has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, most recently, Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems, nominated for an NAACP Image Award; and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; You Don’t Miss Your Water, The Autobiography of a Jukebox; and Brutal Imagination. His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere; and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000). His honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. With Toi Derricotte, Eady founded Cave Canem, an organization that supports the work of African American poets. Eady holds the Miller Chair in Poetry at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
CLAUDIA EMERSON received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Late Wife: Poems (LSU Press, 2005). Figure Studies: Poems, her newest collection, was published in 2008 (LSU Press). She is also the author of the poetry collections Pharaoh, Pharaoh, and Pinion: An Elegy; all volumes are published in Dave Smith's Southern Messenger Poets series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. Emerson is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2008-2010. She is professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
DAVID KIRBY is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock n Roll, which was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement of London as a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense." His collection, The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award, and his latest book of poetry is Talking About Movies With Jesus. With Barbara Hamby, he co-edited Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Sex, and Everything Else. Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. See also www.davidkirby.com.
THOMAS LUX's latest collection is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin 2008). Other books include The Cradle Place; The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems: 1970-1975; and Split Horizon, winner of the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. His distinguished teaching career includes twenty-seven years on the writing faculty and as Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence. He has taught at Emerson College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and other universities. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and recipient of three NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
GREGORY ORR has published ten poetry collections, most recently, How Beautiful the Beloved, (Copper Canyon) and the lyric sequence, Concerning the Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved. A new chapbook, The City of Poetry, is forthcoming from Sarabande. Other works include The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, Orpheus and Eurydice, City of Salt, We Must Make a Kingdom of It, The Red House, Gathering the Bones Together, and Burning the Empty Nests, and prose books Poetry As Survival, and a memoir, The Blessing. In 2009, his essay, “Return to Hayneville,” appeared in Best Essays, Best Creative Non-Fiction, and The Pushcart Prizes. Orr received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the Institute for Violence and Survival, NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
CHASE TWICHELL has published seven books of poetry, most recently, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems, (Copper Canyon, 2010), winner of the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 she won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. Twichell was educated at Trinity College (Hartford, CT (BA, 1973) and the University of Iowa (MFA, 1976), and in 2010 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from St. Lawrence University. After teaching for many years (Hampshire College, The University of Alabama, and Princeton University), she started Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of poetry, which was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009.
ELEANOR WILNER has published seven books of poems, most recently Tourist in Hell (2010, University of Chicago Press); The Girl with Bees in Her Hair, and Reversing the Spell; New & Collected Poems (Copper Canyon). Her publications include a translation of Euripides’ Medea, and a book on visionary imagination, Gathering the Winds. Her poems appear in over 40 anthologies; her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, teaches peripatetically at various colleges and universities, and perennially in the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College. (Photo credit: Jacques-Jean Tiziou)
OTHER FEATURED POETS:
CHARLES WRIGHT, Special Guest
Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935 and was educated at Davidson College and the University of Iowa. His books include Outtakes (Sarabande, 2010); Sestets: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Littlefoot: A Poem (2008); Scar Tissue (2007), which was the international winner for the Griffin Poetry Prize; Buffalo Yoga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004); Negative Blue (2000); Appalachia (1998); Black Zodiac (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Chickamauga (1995), which won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990; Zone Journals (1988); Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1983), which won the National Book Award; Hard Freight (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award; among others.
He has also written two volumes of criticism: Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995) and has translated the work of Dino Campana in Orphic Songs, (Oberlin College Press, 1984) as well as Eugenio Montale's, The Storm and Other Poems, (1978), which was awarded the PEN Translation Prize.
His many honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. See his recent interview on the PBS News Hour at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/charleswright_03-01.html
PERFORMANCE POETS
VANESSA HIDARY
Actress/Solo Performer/ Writer/ Director Native New Yorker Vanessa Hidary, AKA The Hebrew Mamita, grew up on Manhattan's culturally diverse Upper West Side, graduating from LaGuardia High School of the Arts and Hunter College. Her experiences as a Sephardic Jew with close friends from different ethnic and religious backgrounds inspired her to write "Culture Bandit," a solo show about coming of age during the golden age of Hip-Hop. She has appeared three times on HBO’s “Russell Simmon's Def Poetry Jam and in the award-winning film, “The Tribe." Vanessa has been featured in The New York Post, Time Out New York, The Jewish Week, Spitkickers.com, The Forward, URB , BUST, Beyond Race, The LA Times, Jerusalem Post, Time Out NY, and Lilith. Her first book, The Last Kaiser Roll In The Bodega, is forthcoming from Penmanship Books in May 2011. Vanessa holds an MFA in Acting from Trinity Rep Theatre Conservatory.
See Vanessa featured in “The Tribe,” a film that was selected for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, 2006 Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, and the 2007 Jewish Motifs International Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland, (www.tribethefilm.com).
JAMAAL MAY
Jamaal May is a Cave Canem Fellow, Callaloo Fellow and student in Warren Wilson’s MFA for Writers. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, The God Engine, Pudding House Press, 2009) and editor of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Series. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Indiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Blackbird and Verse Daily among other magazines and anthologies. May has received two scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, an International Publication Prize from Atlanta Review, and he was a finalist for the 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He was recently named the 2011-2012 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. May is a two-time Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam Champion, two-time Detroit Slam Champion, five-time team member, and two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist. He has coached three Brave New Voices youth slam teams and taught poetry classes through the Inside Out Literary Arts Project.
LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR has authored three poetry collections, A New Hunger. (Ausable Press 2007), Small Gods of Grief (Boa Editions 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry, and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions 1997). Her poems, widely anthologized, have appeared in many journals including Ploughshares, AGNI and the Harvard Review. One of her poems won the National Poetry Contest, sponsored by I.E. magazine. She has edited numerous anthologies. She was born in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has also published poems in French and Flemish. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College.
KURT BROWN is the author of four full collections of poetry: Future Ship (Red Hen Press, 2007); Fables From The Ark, winner of the Custom Words Poetry Prize; More Things in Heaven and Earth (Four Way Books, 2002); and Return of the Prodigals (Four Way Books, 1999). His fifth collection, No Other Paradise, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2010. Brown is editor of several anthologies and author of six chapbooks, most recently: Sincerest Flatteries (Tupelo Press 2007) and Fables from the Ark, which won the Woodland Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Brown is the founder of the Aspen Writers Conference and teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He serves on the board of Poet’s House in Manhattan where he lives with his wife, the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar.
GINGER MURCHISON assisted Thomas Lux in the founding of POETRY at TECH. Her chapbook, Out Here, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2008. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she has published articles, book reviews, and interviews, and her poems have appeared in recent publications of Horticulture, Atlanta Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine and several anthologies, including Volumes II and III of Java Monkey Speaks: A Poetry Anthology. Editor of the acclaimed Cortland Review, she lives with her husband Clyde Mynatt in Atlanta.
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