Bennington Writers has moved to the Prospect Street Readings.
Mary Abbruzzese was often picked last for flashlight tag, being the youngest of seven siblings. She began working on her first book, a memoir, in 1998. She was a freelance writer for the Jackson Hole Daily News. Her short story ‘Tea Leaves’ won the Warren Adler Short Story Contest, sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council. She was a quarterfinalist in the BlueCat and Scriptapalooza screenplay-writing competitions. She continued to develop her writing skills by taking screenwriting and memoir classes with the Gotham Writers Workshop, the Troy Arts Center, and John Truby Writers Studio. In 2012, Mary was accepted into the New York State Writers Institute. Her work has also appeared in Meat for Tea and The End of the World. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. 7/24/17
Albert Abonado teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo. He is a past NYFA Fellow in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Waxwing, Redivider, The Margins, Zone 3 and others. He curates the ‘CityVerse’ column in Rochester’s alternative weekly City Newspaper and hosts Flour City Yawp on WAYO 104.3 FM-LP. He lives in Rochester, NY with his wife. 12/6/11, 7/23/18
Jennifer Acker is founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Common. Her short stories have been published in n+1, Guernica, The Literary Review, and Sonora Review, among other places; essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, VQR, Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Millions, and The New Inquiry. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Amherst College. 2/23/15
Michael Ahn’s fiction has been in The Quarterly and AQR. Michael works with public defenders and social justice organizations to use story to generate empathy and action. 1/28/13, 12/17/18, 8/14/19
Sara Alaica is a nomad and a citizen of the world. She grew up in Canada and the Balkans, and has lived throughout Asia and the Pacific Islands. She earned her BA in literature from Carleton University, her MA from the University of Toronto, and currently manages digital communications for Columbia University. Alaica blogs at alittleroad.com. 6/26/17
Lisa Alexander received both the Fugue 2013 Prose Award and the UCLA James Kirkwood Award for Fiction. Her work has, or is about to appear in Litro, Meridian, Fugue, Cimarron, The Common, and the anthology, Mourning Sickness. She received her MFA from Bennington College in June 2011 and lives in Los Angeles with her family and two of the biggest cats she could find. 1/27/14
Royal Alvis graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January of 2005. He teaches creative writing to seniors at JASA Club 76 and his stories have appeared in The Storyteller, The Rambler, The Newport Review, Succor, and Midnight Circus. He recently finished a novel from which he will now be reading. 6/25/18
Stephania Amfitheatrof 1/25/17
Benjamin Anastas is the author of two novels, An Underachiever’s Diary, and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, which was named among the year’s Notable Books by The New York Times. His novella, Versace Enthroned with Saints Margaret<, Jerome, Alex, and the Angel Donatella, appeared in The Yale Review and received the magazine’s Smart Family Foundation Prize for fiction. His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications including Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Men’s Vogue, and GQ. Anastas is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars. His memoir, Too Good To Be True, will be published this fall. 9/30/12
Christine Anderes lives on a dune compressed between the ocean and bay. She’s a conservationist, animal activist, and volunteer firefighter (EMS.) She has three poems appearing next month in the international anthology, The Poetic Bond, vol. VII. Poems of hers have appeared annually in this anthology for the past five years. Anderes’ work has appeared in journals in France and the United States. Presently, she is at work on three collections of poetry: Bodies in Motion, Juggernaut and Deposed – attesting to the beauty and resilience of nature, as well as the critical state of our planet and its inhabitants.4/29/13, 9/25/17
J.R. Angelella is the author of the novel Zombie, published by Soho Press in early June, as well as a young adult series co-written with his wife, Kate Angelella, forthcoming from Sourcebooks/Teen Fire in 2013. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Sou’wester, JMWW, The Collagist, Fiction Writers Review, The Quivering Pen, Largehearted Boy, and The Nervous Breakdown. His short story “Sauce” won The Coachella Review 2012 Short Story Contest. Angelella received an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January ’09 and currently teaches creative writing at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. 8/27/12
Liz Arnold has been recognized in prose contests held by Georgetown Review and The Atlantic, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Dwell, Teachers & Writers Magazine, online at The Paris Review, and elsewhere. ‘Homebodies,’ her blog about the homes of people she visits, has received national press, including a feature in T Magazine. A freelance writer and editor, Liz teaches creative writing in the New York public schools through residencies from Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She lives in Brooklyn. 2/17/14
Sally Ashton is editor-in-chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She is the author of three poetry collections, and a fourth book, The Behavior of Clocks, just released in 2019. Ashton has taught at San Jose State University and numerous workshops, and is assistant editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Brevity, Poetry Flash, San Pedro River Review, Jet Fuel, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 4/24/17, 5/22/19
Robert Atwan is series editor for the highly acclaimed Best American Essays, which he launched in 1986. The editor of numerous literary anthologies, his essays, criticism, humor, poetry, book reviews and scholarly work have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Image, Denver Quarterly, River Teeth, and Kugelmass. He will read a portion of a forthcoming essay, “Montaigne and Me,” a meditation on sex, embarrassment, erotic poetry, and the maladies of old age. 4/2/14
Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo is a prize-winning poet, critic and performer. She is the author of The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books). Recent work appears in AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Bennington College. A classically trained musician and an advocate of cross-genre work, she has performed sound/text collaborations with artists such as Salman Rushdie and members of The National, Bon Iver, and American String Quartet. She lives in New York City. 12/6/11, 9/27/15
A.W. Barnes is the author of the new memoir, The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence, published by Bucknell University Press and distributed by Rutgers University Press. The book has been nominated for a Lambda Literary prize and a Publishing Triangle award. He received his MFA at Bennington in nonfiction in 2017. He is also the author Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England. He works at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. 4/25/16, 2/27/19
Julie Batten is the founder of the Glass House Shelter Project, a grassroots organization that brings college reading & writing courses into homeless shelters. She teaches writing at both Salem State University and the University of Massachusetts / Boston and drives like a true Bostonian between the two. 11/27/17
Paul Beckman is an award-winning author with a new flash collection, Kiss Kiss (Truth Serum Press). He had a story selected for the 2018 Norton Micro-fiction Anthology and another nominated for The Best Small Fictions 2019 BSF. He lives in Connecticut and runs the FBomb NY flash fiction reading series in KGB’s Red Room. Some of his publications are Spelk, Necessary Fiction, Litro, Pank, Playboy, Thrice Fiction, The Lost Balloon, and The Raleigh Review. 7/27/15, 1/23/19
April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Brawl & Jag, her fifth collection of poems, is just out from W.W. Norton. Miss Fuller, a novel, was published by Steerforth Press in 2012. Her previous books of poems are Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye. Bernard, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and other journals, is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College, and also teaches in the Bennington MFA Writing Program. 4/25/16
Charles Bock is the author of the novels, Alice & Oliver, and Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Charles is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and his daughter in New York City. 6/27/16
Gina Boubion was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York. Stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Philadelphia Daily News, 580 Split, Latina, Bride’s, and Reed Magazine, where she is a finalist for the 2012 Steinbeck Short Story Award. Gina has a piece in the most current online iteration of The Common. A former newspaper reporter in Philadelphia, St. Paul (MN), San Jose, and Mexico City, she covered breaking news, poverty, and juvenile justice. She holds graduate degrees from Northwestern University and Bennington College. 2/27/12
Rebecca Boucher is an attorney who practiced in Manhattan Family Court representing parents accused of abuse or neglect of their children. She is writing a book about the child welfare system. 2/27/19
Amy Bowers is a New Haven-based writer who until recently lived in steamy central Florida. Her work has been published in Mabel, Bella Grace, PANK, and the essay she is reading tonight will be anthologized in a forthcoming book. She writes about the natural world, family life, art, and popular history. Recent research has included Fanny Palmer, the prolific Currier and Ives artist, habitat dioramas, eggs, and domestic advice literature. 1/22/20
Patrick Boyle is editor-in-chief of Lamplighter, an alternative arts and music publication based in and focused on New Jersey. He is a 2014 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and his poetry has been published in Jelly Bucket, Four Chambers, and Cooper Street. Follow him on Twitter @Patboyle. 4/29/13, 4/27/15
Molly Guinn Bradley is in her second term at the Bennington Writing Seminars, pursuing a dual-genre degree in nonfiction and fiction. Her writing recently received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train and has previously been featured on The Toast and Splitsider, two online humor-writing publications that have since shut down. She’s fairly certain this is a coincidence, but if you’re growing weary of running your own humor site, please solicit her work. 10/22/18, 1/23/19, 8/14/19
Shevaun Brannigan is a poet based in Philadelphia, where she works at an animal shelter. She has been previously published in such journals as Best New Poets 2012, Free State Review, Lumina, and Court Green. She received her MFA from Bennington in June of 2013, and since graduation her dreams have been filled with Adirondack chairs and feature the occasional narration by Sven. 12/30/13
Elijah Burrell was raised in Missouri and has lived there for most of his life. Aldrich Press published his first poetry collection, The Skin of the River, in 2014, and they have published his second book, TROUBLER, in 2018. Burrell received the 2010 Jane Kenyon Scholarship at Bennington College, where he earned his MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington’s Writing Seminars. His writing has appeared in publications such as AGNI, North American Review, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Sugar House Review, Measure, and many others. In 2012 Burrell joined the faculty of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. An assistant professor in Lincoln’s Department of Humanities and Communication, Burrell teaches creative writing and literature. 4/27/15, 11/26/18
Rita Calderon’s work has appeared in REAL Regarding Arts & Letters, was accepted by Ars Medica, and published in The Philadelphia Daily News, The Riverdale Press, and the travel section of The New York Times. Her short story co-won a 2013 fiction-writing contest sponsored by the Catskills Institute and Loyola Marymount University’s Jewish Studies Program. Spoken arts readings include Above the Bridge Writers, the Sunday Best Reading Series, Word-Up Bookstore, and now, the Cornelia Street Café. Rita began writing eons ago with a food column for several syndicated newspapers, then became interested in creative nonfiction, and more recently has branched outward, and inward, to fiction. She enters her second term at Bennington College Writing Seminars and lives in New York City. 5/26/14
Tess Callahan is the author of the novel, April & Oliver, from Grand Central Publishing. Her short work has appeared in AGNI, Narrative, The New York Times Magazine, NPR’s ‘Three Books’ Series’ and Writer’s Digest, among others. She is a TEDx presenter on creativity. During her MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars she was fortunate to study with Amy Hempel, who taught her the wisdom of concision. 5/22/17, 8/28/19
Cecile Callan recently earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a published poet and award-winning playwright. Her writing has appeared in Brevity Blog and Louisiana Literature. She is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. 5/22/17
Diane Cameron is a writer, and writing teacher, and speaker. She was in the Class of 1999 at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her newspaper columns appear in The Albany Times Union and many papers and magazines. She is the author of three books,Looking for Signs, a collection of essays; Out of the Woods about women in recovery; and Never Leave Your Dead, a history of military trauma. Her essays on trauma have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 5/25/15, 2/27/19
Miriam Camitta, a Philadelphia-based writer, earned her MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2016. She is a life-long educator, currently in semi-retirement, writing and editing for Cleaver Magazine, as well as teaching literature and creative writing in Temple University’s non-credit division. Her documentary film, Crosstown, was nominated for Best Independent at the 2001 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema and aired on local public television. Miriam earned a doctorate in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for over 30 years, and last year won Head and the Hand’s annual spelling contest for Philly-area literary organizations. 12/17/18
Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s fiction has appeared in journals including The Massachusetts Review and the Southampton Review. She received her MFA from Bennington in 2009 and is a past Fellow of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A collection of her stories, Contents Under Pressure, has just been published by the Broadkill River Press and was nominated by the Press for The National Book Award. Next spring, her novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, will be published by Apprentice House Press of Loyola University, Baltimore. She is a contributing editor of The Fiction Writers Review and also reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Campbell lives with her husband in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. 11/27/15
Matthew David Campbell is the author of a poetry collection entitled, Harmonious Anarchy, (Weasel Press 2016), and a chapbook, The House of Eros, (Red Ferret Press 2015). His poems have appeared in Tight, Spires, Forklift Ohio, and the anthologies, The Brink: Post Modern Poetry from 1965 to the Present, Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, and How Well You Walk Through Madness. He holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in New Jersey. 8/26/13, 9/25/17
Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus (The Word Works, 2018), noted on Small Press Distribution’s Recommends and Bestseller lists. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she won Narrative‘s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly‘s TQ7 Poetry Prize. Video readings of her poems were featured in Narrative Outloud. Willa lives in New York City. Her work can be found at willacarroll.com 12/6/11, 6/30/14, 11/26/18
Monica Carter is a writer, poet, and reviewer. She was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, a Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT Emerging Voices Fellow, and a fiction graduate of the prestigious PEN Center’s MARK program. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals including The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, Cactus Heart, Bloom and the anthology Strange Cargo. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today and Foreword Reviews. She is finishing her first novel. 5/28/18, 8/14/19
Marcelo Castro was born and raised in Mexico City and has lived in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. He went to college in Mexico. He received a diploma in Spanish and Latin American literature and attended drama school in Spain. In 1994, Marcelo moved to New York to work in the corporate world. In 2015, he earned a degree in humanities from the Harvard Extension School. In 2018, he graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and with an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Marcelo lives in Connecticut. 12/17/18
Andrea Caswell grew up in Los Angeles, and later earned degrees at Tufts and Harvard. She holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published by River Teeth, The Normal School, Columbia Journal, CONSEQUENCE, and others. She’s an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, and serves on the Board of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center. Caswell lives with her husband in Newburyport, Massachusetts. 11/27/17
Rebecca Caum graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2013. Her memoir, Love Like Animals, is due to be finished this spring. 10/24/16
Rebecca Chace is the author of two novels, Leaving Rock Harbor;and Capture the Flag; a memoir, Chautauqua Summer; and a children’s book, June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny. She has had stage plays produced in New York and regionally, Colette and The Awakening (an adaptation of the novel by Kate Chopin). She has also adapted her novel, Capture the Flag, for the screen and television. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the Huffington Post, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, NPR’s All Things Considered, and other publications. She works at Fairleigh Dickinson University as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, while directing the MA Program in Creative Writing. She also serves as an associate faculty member at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. 3/25/13, 3/28/16, 2/26/20
Elaine Fletcher Chapman recently published a volume of poems, Hunger for Salt, through Saint Julian Press and a letterpress chapbook, Double Solitude, at Green River Press. She teaches literature at Old Dominion University. Elaine served on the staff of The Bennington Writing Seminars for 18 years and founded The Writer’s Studio where she teaches poetry, nonfiction and an ongoing class, ‘On Keeping a Journal’. She works as a therapist in private practice, as well as a certified iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation teacher. Her poetry has been published in Rabid Oak, The Tishman Review, The EcoTheo Review, The Cortland Review, Connotation, The Sun, Calyx, Poet Lore, 5AM, Salamander, and others. Elaine lives on the west side of the Chesapeake Bay near the James River in Newport News, Virginia. 9/25/17, 4/24/19
Alexander Chee is a fiction writer, poet, journalist, and reviewer. Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best American Erotica 2007, A Fictional History of the US (With Huge Chunks Missing), Men on Men 2000, and His 3. His essay ‘I, Reader’ was selected for inclusion in the Notable Essays list of the 2011 edition of the Best American Essays. Compilations of his personal essays have appeared in From Boys To Men, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, The M Word, and The Man I Might Become;and his poetry can be found in Barrow Street, LIT, Interview, the James White Review, and XXX Fruit. He was a judge for the PEN/Open Book award in 2012. He has taught fiction writing at the New School, Wesleyan, and Amherst and currently serves on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Chee’s second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish. 2/29/16
Susan Cheever’s books include My Name Is Bill – Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous; Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever; Note Found in a Bottle, a memoir of her own alcoholism and recovery; Treetops: A Memoir; and five novels: Looking for Work,A Handsome Man,The Cage,Doctors and Women, and Elizabeth Cole. Her essay ‘Baby Battle,’ in which she describes immersion in early motherhood and subsequent phases of letting go of her primary identity as a mother, was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars, edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner. Cheever is the author of American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, published in December 2006. In addition to working on her books, she teaches in the Bennington Writing SeminarsMFA program and at The New School. e. e. cummings: a life, her latest book, will be published by Pantheon on February 11, 2014. 2/17/14
Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We’re So Famous and Vernon Downs; editor of the anthologies Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine;(with Mary Cotton), and Boston Noir 2: The Classics(with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston. 4/28/14, 7/25/16
Martha Cooley is a novelist and author of short fiction, essays, and poetry whose work has appeared in leading literary journals. Her first novel, The Archivist, was a bestseller published in a dozen foreign markets, and her second, Thirty-Three Swoons, has been published in Italian. Martha translates prose and poetry from the Italian and has taught numerous workshops and seminars in Italy. An Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University, she also serves on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an active member of PEN American Center and a contributing editor for several literary magazines. 1/27/14
Carrie Cooperider’s writing has been published in Cabinet, Antioch Review, The Southampton Review, Artishock, NY Tyrant, the online journal 3:AM, and elsewhere. Her story ‘Stutterers’ was chosen by guest editor Amy Hempel for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2017. Cooperider has an MFA in painting from Queens College; attended the Whitney Independent Studio Program; and is currently an MFA candidate in the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives on an island off the southern coast of Manhattan. 10/23/17, 8/28/19
Whit Coppedge’s fiction and other work have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, The Tusculum Review, and The Dos Passos Review, among other publications. He was awarded North Carolina State’s Brenda L. Smart Fiction Prize, part of a dominating stretch of three wins in five years for Bennington graduates, and was a founding member of the late Triangle-area writers’ center, The Hinge. He lives in Chapel Hill. 5/22/17
Chantal Corcoran is, of course, a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, as well as a Canadian currently residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, where her freelance work and book reviews appear regularly in local publications. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and her fiction can be read at Litro, The Milo Review, Lost Magazine, and Monkeybicycle. She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. 9/27/15
Jackie Corley is the publisher of Word Riot, an online magazine and small press. Her fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Redivider and 3AM Magazine, among others, and in various print anthologies. Corley graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2011. 9/29/14
Ruth Crocker is thrilled to be reading tonight with the Bennington crew. Since (that sad day of) graduation in January 2011, Ruth has published two award-winning nonfiction books and several essays, one named a notable essay in Best American Essays and another receiving a Pushcart nomination. Presently, she is working on a collection of essays and – to her surprise – some historical fiction. She frequently speaks at Veterans Coffeehouses and workshops where she encourages the art of personal storytelling and, this summer, she will be teaching nonfiction writing at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Mass. She presented her memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War to President Obama at the White House in 2014 and she has promised to write another one – or anything at all – if he will please come back. She lives and writes in Mystic, Connecticut. 9/30/12, 5/19/14, 6/26/19
Traci Evadne Currie is a Jamaican-American spoken word artist who hails from the East Coast. She taught Communication Studies in Flint, Michigan for fourteen years and worked with young women in juvenile detention employing mindful art practices. Her interests focus on trauma and healing, restorative justice, and art-centered practices. 8/27/18
David Daniel’s Seven-Star Bird, published by Graywolf Press, won the Larry Levis Prize for the best first or second book of its year. Writing about that book, Harold Bloom called Daniel “an authentic heir of Hart Crane”, and Tom Sleigh wrote, “Daniel is one of the purest and most powerful lyric poets of his generation.” Many of the poems from his new book, Ornaments, Pitt Poetry Series, Fall 2017, have been featured in The American Poetry Review, Connotation: An Online Artifact, and Memorius. Daniel was Poetry Editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade, and is the founder and producer of WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together many of the most celebrated artists in the world, including Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, Jonathan Demme, Rosanne Cash, C.D. Wright, Talib Kweli, and John Doe, for unique performances and conversations. He teaches in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University and he serves on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. 11/27/17
April Darcy’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, the North American Review, and Consequences Magazine, and she has been shortlisted in competitions at Glimmer Train, the Iowa Review, Hunger Mountain, the Sonora Review, and Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. She was the recipient of the 2018 Shenandoah River Fiction Award, and grants from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. 5/23/16, 1/23/19, 3/13/19
Jarita Davis is a poet and fiction writer with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. She was the writer-in-residence at the Nantucket Historical Association and has received fellowships from the Mellon Mayes program, Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Davis’ work has appeared in the Southwestern Review, Historic Nantucket, Cave Canem Anthologies, Crab Orchard Review, Plainsongs, Tuesday; An Art Project, Verdad Magazine, and Cape Cod Poetry Review. Her collection Return Flights is forthcoming from Tagus Press March 2016. She lives and writes in West Falmouth, Mass. 2/29/16
Kristy Davis swings both ways: fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Swink Magazine and TK Review, and she has contributed journalism to Newsday, Condé Nast Traveler, and O, the Oprah Magazine, where she is currently an associate editor. Recently she quit smoking and has been making to-do lists and circling very important items, which she then does not do. She did, however, finish her MFA in fiction writing and literature at Bennington College Writing Seminars this June. 8/27/12
Alex Dawson teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, Middlesex County College, and the Middlesex County Arts High School. He is the author of The Rapscallion Club, a forthcoming archeological adventure series for all ages, which has received advance praise from Lev Grossman of Time Magazine and World Fantasy Award winner John Crowley, among others. Until 2012, Dawson was the owner of The Raconteur, a bookshop and performance venue, hailed by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and The Newark Star Ledger. He founded Raconteur Ventures, a company dedicated to reviving and animating communities through cultural programming, and hosts Raconteurs & Roustabouts, a vaudevillian variety show that puts authors on stage alongside musicians and sideshow performers. 6/30/14, 8/14/19
Dylan Debelis is a founding editor of Pelorus Press, publisher, poet, and performer based out of New York City. His day job is as a hospital chaplain in an Intensive Care Burn Unit. Debelis has been published in a diversity of influential literary magazines and reviews including Prairie Schooner, [TAB] Literary Review, and [apt] Poetry Review. His first full-length book of poetry entitled The Garage? Just Torch It was a finalist in the Vine Leaves Press Annual Vignette Award. Follow him on twitter: @dylanddebelis. 6/26/17
Matt Debenham is the author of The Book of Right and Wrong, winner of the 2009 Ohio State University Press Prize for Fiction. He also has a pair of independently published stories on Amazon.com: “The Advocate” (a finalist in Narrative‘s Fall Fiction contest) and “Challenger.” His work has appeared in such publications as Roanoke Review, Battered Suitcase, The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many others. He has received a Fiction Fellowship from the state of Connecticut, was a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, and is the host of the books podcast, ‘What Are You Reading?’ He blogs about writing at mattdebenham.com. 3/25/13, 5/23/16
Annie Decker’s essays and observational humor pieces have aired on NPR and local public radio, appeared in newspapers and magazines, and been anthologized in various collections of both nonfiction and verse. A late bloomer, she received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2011. She lives and writes in upstate New York. She has an ailing husband, four grown sons, three grandsons and a granddaughter, all of whom she considers fair game. 3/25/13
Bibi Deitz is a writer, editor, and native New Yorker. Her work has been published in Storyscape, Paper Darts, Bookforum, Bomb, Vice, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and has received support from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Bibi recently finished writing her first novel, Stand Clear the Closing Doors. More at bibideitz.com. 12/17/19
A.N. Devers’ most recent essay, ‘A Tale of Two Houses,’ was published this month online in The New Yorker. She has appeared or is forthcoming in Bust magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Review Daily, The Southampton Review, The Rumpus, TimeOut NY, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Washington Post. She is on the editorial board at PEN America: A Journal for Writers & Readers. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2008 and is the editor of writershouses.com, a website for literary pilgrims everywhere. 8/25/11
Russell Dillon is the author of Eternal Patrol and the chapbook Secret Damage(both from Forklift Books). Recently, he attended the Vermont Studio Center as a James Merrill Fellow, where he went slightly insane sitting in a small room trying to write more poems. Dillon is the editor of Big Bell, a sometimes annual magazine of art and poetry and his work can be found in handfuls of other magazines and online caverns. 4/29/13, 4/25/16
Heather Dobbins’ poems and poetry reviews have appeared in Big Muddy, CutBank, Raleigh Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology (Tennessee), The Rumpus, and TriQuarterly Review, among others. She was a featured poet for Beloit Poetry Journal last June. After ten years of earning degrees in California and Vermont, she returned to her hometown of Memphis. Her debut, In the Low Houses, was just published in March by Kelsay Press. Her work can be found at heatherdobbins.com. 6/25/12, 6/30/14
Mary Donnelly, a 2003 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, is a Brooklyn-based poet, educator, and video producer. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hunger Mountain, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, and The Yale Review, and her chapbook Mad World Colored Oil recently came out from Dancing Girl Press. She teaches through Gotham Writers Workshop and in the low-residency MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts at Sierra Nevada College, and is an editor for DMQ Review. 11/12/12, 9/26/16, 1/23/19, 5/22/19
Hugo dos Santos is a Luso-American writer and translator. He has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and by the Disquiet International Literary Program. He is the translator of A Child in Ruins (Writ Large Press, 2016), the collected poems of José Luís Peixoto. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in various publications in the US and Europe, including upstreet, Public Pool, Lunch Ticket, Queen Mob’s Tea House, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of ironbound – a blog. 2/27/17
Maureen Duffy is a writer and lawyer in New York City. In the autumns of 2014 and 2015, she was awarded writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and looks forward to returning there again soon. Since graduating from Bennington in ’08, she has published and/or had performed stories, poems, and essays in various journals – in print, on-line and “live.” She has recently completed a memoir, No Wisdom, and hopes to finish her novel, Gemma, by the first day of spring…or summer…or… 9/30/13, 1/23/17
Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), the winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and coeditor (with poet, Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). His poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Verse. Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated with his family at the age of five. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Dumanis has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, and Nebraska Wesleyan University, and since 2007, had been professor of English at Cleveland State University, where he also served as Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, a literary press, and taught in the Northeast Ohio MFA Program. Dumanis joined the Bennington College faculty in fall 2012. 8/26/13
Sally Eckhoff (BWS ’09) is a painter, animator, and horse rider who lives upstate in the Hudson Valley. Her first book, F*ck Art (Let’s Dance) is a memoir of ten years she spent painting in the East Village, from the Summer of Sam to the Tompkins Square Park riots. Tonight, she’s going to read from its upcoming sequel, How Horses Get Their Names. 2/25/13, 9/24/18, 1/23/19
Valerie Ellis’ fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Enclitic, The Falls, the Progressive, and In These Times, among others. Her plays have been produced and/or workshopped at Red Eye Collaboration, Naked Angels, the American Place Theater, and the American Repertory Theater for Advanced Theater Training. She graduated with an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January ’03. 1/27/14, 7/24/19
Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College in January 2008, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her new collection, Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic, is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is available from White Violet Press. She blogs at annamevans.com/wordpress. 4/29/13, 5/19/14, 4/23/18
Teresa Fazio served in the Marine Corps from 2002-2006, deploying once to Iraq, and is pausing a career in technology commercialization to write full-time. She will graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars in nonfiction next month. Despite this, she’ll read to you some fiction that was published in The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War. Teresa has also been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Penthouse, among other publications, and several anthologies. 5/28/18
Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017), which The New Yorker called “mesmerizing,” and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist. Her second essay collection will be published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Her work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, The Guardian, The New York Time Book Review, The Rumpus, among many others. Febos earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and she currently serves as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University. She serves on the Board of Directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She curates literary events, serves on boards, teaches workshops, and speaks widely. The daughter of a sea captain and a psychotherapist, she was raised on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn. 10/22/18
Rachel Feingold is an avid reader and writer of novels, now finishing her second term at Bennington Writing Seminars while living in West Hartford, Connecticut with her husband and four children. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1974 at the age of eight, and finds that her relationship to the English language is still evolving, along with her fondness for the peculiar stew that constitutes life in America. 5/27/13
Libby Flores is a 2008 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Post Road Magazine, Tin House: The Open Bar, The Guardian, Paper Darts, FLASH: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the former Director of Literary Programs at PEN Center USA, now PEN America LA. In 2018 she directed the second annual Believer Festival. She is currently the Director of Audience Engagement and Digital Projects at BOMB magazine and the NYC Director of the Freya Project. Libby holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Brooklyn, but will always be a Texan. She is represented by Sarah Bowlin at Aevitas Creative Management. 7/24/19
George Michelsen Foy’s latest nonfiction book, Run the Storm: A Savage Hurricane, a Brave Crew, and the Wreck of the SS El Faro, was published in May 2018 by Scribner. Of his thirteen novels, the latest entitled Mettle was published in 2010 by University Press of New England. Foy’s long-form nonfiction has been appeared in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal and others, and his short fiction and essays in Ep;phany Journal, Washington Square Review, Monkey Bicycle, Apeiron, Notre Dame Review, American Literary Review etc. Foy was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and he lives in southeastern New England and Brooklyn and teaches writing at NYU. At various times, he has worked as a factory hand, agricultural laborer, commercial fisherman, watchkeeping officer on British tramp freighters, and as chief transporter of cream pastries in a cookie factory. 10/23/19
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon 2016). Her poems have appeared such places as Guernica, New England Review, and Harvard Review and she received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her manuscript in progress. The co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious, Frank will be the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University beginning in Fall 2016. 4/25/16
Christopher Frizzelle has been a writer and editor at The Stranger for fifteen years, including ten as editor-in-chief. He edited a feature story in 2012 that won a Pulitzer Prize. He is a co-author the book How to Be a Person, along with Dan Savage and Lindy West. He earned an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and is the founder and host of the silent-reading party, a monthly event in Seattle that has been replicated in cities around the world. 4/23/18
Charlie Gadol is still a practicing pathologist working part time in the Hudson Valley. He directs a couple of long distance trail races in the Catskills and still runs himself, but at a much slower pace now. Charlie continues to write poetry and collect rejections from poetry journals. His work has been published in Stymie, Nerve Cowboy, and a few other journals. 12/30/13, 1/22/18
Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was listed as ‘Notable’ in Best American Essays 2017, and her essays, poems, and art have been published or are forthcoming in Redivider, Longreads, Hotel Amerika, Catapult, The Coachella Review, Reservoir, and PANK, among others. She runs The Dollhouse, a creepy and fascinating feminist visual art project. She is Associate Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. 6/24/13, 12/28/15, 10/22/18
Rebecca Gee writes poetry and fiction, and her poetry has been published in The Madison Review, The End of the World, and The Writers Studio @ 30, an anthology published by Epiphany Editions. She is the co-founder and director of Kids Write, a nonprofit branch of The Writers Studio, where she teaches creative writing to youth in Brooklyn. She has developed online workshops for high school students with dyslexia and an online workshop that trains parents, tutors, and teachers how to use creative writing to teach writing and reading skills to dyslexic students. Gee is also an artist whose work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Austin, and St. Petersburg, Russia. She is Director of Development at Hudson Hall at the historic Hudson Opera House, a multi-arts center in Hudson, New York. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2016. 12/30/14, 7/24/17
Tessa Gerling is the author of Restless Bones, a collection of short stories, and is at present working on a novel titled Waiting for Norma Jean. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her short fiction has appeared in the inboxes of numerous literary magazine editors, and several of her stories have been notables among a small but very devoted circle of readers. Originally from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, she currently divides her time between Cambridge, Mass; Ontario, Canada; and Paris, France. 9/25/19
Melissa Giannini grew up in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs and is a terrible driver. After totaling four cars, she left the Motor City for Brooklyn, where she happily rides through a tunnel every morning to her job as a senior editor for Nylon magazine. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2012. 7/29/13
Richard Gotti has a story appearing in the Chautauqua Literary Journal. The Hudson Valley Writers Guild and Theater Voices selected one of his stories for a staged reading, and the Albany Civic Theater chose his one-act play for its 2012 Playwright’s Showcase. He co-authored a nonfiction book, Overcoming Regret, published by Bantam. A psychotherapist, he teaches at SUNY Empire State College and lives with his painter wife in the Albany area. Gotti is a June 2007 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. 5/27/13
Frances Greathead is in her first semester studying creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She just quit her career and moved in with her mother on the Upper East Side to pursue her lifelong dream of writing, so she really hopes it works out. By fluke, she once published a short story in The Massachusetts Review. Greathead spends her days tutoring, writing, and trying not to freak out about the fact that she’s thirty-one and has no idea what’s next. 10/24/16, 1/23/19
Jayson Greene is the author of Once More We Saw Stars forthcoming in May 2019. He is contributing editor and former senior editor at Pitchfork. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, and GQ, among other publications. 2/27/19
Margo Greenfield (BWS ’09) practices labor and immigration law in New Jersey. Her stories about identity, health, work, and family have appeared in a few small print and online publications. 7/25/16
Matthew Groner is in his final term at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he served as a Residential Teaching Fellow. He currently teaches with the Bennington College Prison Education Initiative. In several weeks, Matt will attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute on scholarship. 1/23/19, 6/26/19
Jayne Guertin is a Rhode Island-based writer and photographer. Her work is informed by art, nature, and the abundance of strange and mysterious moments. Her writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, PANK Magazine, and, along with her photos, in The Tishman Review (who recently nominated her for a Pushcart Prize), Yankee Magazine, where she is a contributing blogger, and local publications. Guertin’s photography has also appeared in Lamplighter Magazine, as well as on the cover of MOTIF: Seeking Its Own Level: an anthology of writings about water. 12/28/15
Kelsea Habecker is an award-winning poet and writer. Her first book of poetry, Hollow Out, was selected by US Poet Laureate Charles Simic as the winner of New Rivers Press’s Many Voices Award. In 2018, she published a chapbook, The Walrus Wives, through Dancing Girl Press and her poetry collection, North Wife, will be forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Kelsea teaches university creative writing and leads writing retreats in the US and abroad. For five years, she taught school in a remote Inupiaq Eskimo village in the Arctic region of Alaska, an experience that informs much of her writing. Kelsea earned her BA from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and her MFA in poetry from Bennington Writing Seminars. 5/22/19
Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her recent books include Life in a Country Album(2019),praised by Claire Messud as a book that “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination—a contemporary Orpheus”; the flash collection The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. She is a professor at Columbia University, and writes the literary travel column ‘The City and the Writer’ for Words without Borders magazine. 10/23/19
V. Hansmann was raised by wealthy people in suburban New Jersey growing up to be neurotic, alcoholic, homosexual, and old. In June 2011, he completed a low-residency MFA in creative writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. His publishing credits consist of essays in The New York Times, BLOOM, Post Road, The Common online, Best Travel Writing, Vol. 10, and Flash Nonfiction Funny, where he nestled between covers with Sven Birkerts, and poetry in Structo, Subtropics, The Tishman Review, and Bang!, the online iteration of The New Guard. In August 2011, V established a monthly reading series, Bennington Writers, at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. And as of January 2019, the series has moved to the KGB bar on East Fourth Street. 6/30/14, 1/26/15, 12/28/15, 8/22/16, 7/24/17,11/26/18
Ryan Harbage lives in Bed Stuy with his kids and works in book publishing. 11/27/19
JoeAnn Hart is the author of the true crime memoir, Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, (University of Iowa Press, April, 2019) and the novels Float and Addled. Her short fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Boston Globe Magazine, Design New England, Orion, Solstice, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered. 11/28/16, 4/24/19
Ken Harvey is the author of two award-winning books: a collection of short stories, If You Were with Me Everything Would Be All Right, and a memoir, A Passionate Engagement. He’s been published in over twenty literary magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, Consequence, and The Buenos Aires Review. He’s read his work on National Public Radio in the United States and in Italy and has been granted writing residencies at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Millay Colony. A regular book reviewer for Lambda Literary, Ken holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. 11/25/13, 12/17/19
Pete Hausler sez:
How I know V: The Bennington Writing Seminars – I’m a January 1997 graduate of the third BWS class.
Lit chops: Founding and current nonfiction editor of Post Road, a bi-annual magazine created by a handful of BWS graduates, who launched the first issue in 2000; still going strong and now an integral and popular part of the Boston College undergrad writing program.
Writing: Essays and sports writing in Salon.com, AGNI, The Wall Street Journal, Fourth Genre, and Fanzine.
Lives: Long-time New Yorker, who has resided in three of the five boroughs, currently lives in the Queens Prefecture and Milanville, Penna.
With: Wife Olesia and two intelligent & lovely teenage daughters.
Used to live: Baltimore, Prague, London, Nantucket and various parts of New Jersey. 3/25/13, 1/26/15, 12/18/17, 1/22/20
Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things(Doubleday/Anchor), was a Book Sense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, short-listed for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. In addition, the novel became a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Hay currently teaches and works part-time at the Center for Fiction, www.centerforfiction.org. 10/27/14
Laura Haynes is a 2012 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars in poetry, but she made a transgenre 3rd semester switch to fiction. She lives in Santa Barbara. Recent work can be seen in the Crab Orchard Review. In 2014, Haynes was awarded the Prime Magazine Poetry Prize. 8/26/13, 11/27/15
Amy Hempel is the author of five story collections, most recently Sing to It, (Scribner). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Foundation fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, and many others. Her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best Nonrequired Reading, and The Pushcart Prize. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Bennington College and at Stony Brook. 8/28/19
Paul Hertneky has written stories, essays, and scripts for the Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, NBC News, The Comedy Channel, Gourmet, Eating Well, Traveler’s Tales, The Exquisite Corpse, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Adbusters, and The Athens News. Last fall, he was named one of Poets & Writers ‘5 over 50’ top debut authors for his recent memoir, RUST BELT BOY: Stories of an American Childhood. He has won a Solas Award for travel writing and received two James Beard Award nominations. A 2001 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University and lives in Hancock, New Hampshire. 5/22/17
Judith Hertog grew up in Amsterdam, studied in Israel, lived and traveled in Asia, and resides now in Vermont with her family. Judith is an essayist, journalist, teacher, and storyteller. She teaches creative writing at Colby Sawyer College and storytelling workshops at correctional facilities. She also organizes storytelling events in New Hampshire and Vermont. In addition to being a writer and storyteller, Judith also loves photography. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Indiana Review, The Common, Consequence Magazine, Hunger Mountain, Tin House, and Zone 3. Judith holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. 10/28/13, 3/13/19
Beatrice Hill’s fiction has appeared in the journal Phenomenal Literature. She is also, under the nom de guerre, Susan Christie, a singer who went from being a never-was to a has-been with a recent appearance in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. 8/22/16
Jeff Hill is a moderately reformed frat boy turned writer/teacher, splitting his time between Nebraska and New York. His work has appeared in dozens of publications and his mom has a binder full of printed copies for any doubters. He is the Chief Creative Officer of ComicBooked.com and is currently pitching two novels. Jeff is a regular participant of the Sarah Lawrence College Summer Seminar for Writers and has served as a faculty member of the Writer’s Hotel since 2017. Follow him on twitter at #jeffhillwriter. 6/25/18
John Hill is a 2009 Bennington MFA. His fiction has appeared in The Southampton Journal, as well as in Inertia andSexandmurder. He is also a music producer, songwriter, film composer, and teacher. He lives in New Jersey and Palo Alto, California, depending on his mood. 1/28/13, 8/22/16
Katherine Hill is the author of a novel, The Violet Hour, published by Scribner this July. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in AGNI, The Believer, Bookforum, Colorado Review, The Common, n+1, and the San Francisco Chronicle. A graduate of Yale University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, she serves as an assistant editor at Barrelhouse. She lives with her husband in Princeton, New Jersey. 9/30/13
Danuta Hinc (Hints) is a novelist and author of short fiction and essays whose work has appeared in literary journals worldwide. She is a Lecturer at University of Maryland where she teaches writing. Her first novel, To Kill the Other, (2011), is the fictionalized life story of one of the 9/11 hijackers. Hinc is presently working on a novel, Angels in the Forest, based on the life of her grandfather during World War II. She is translating, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel into Polish. Hinc lives in Ellicott City, Maryland with her husband Dan, son Alex, and their giant schnauzer, Rex. More information can be found on her website: https://danutahinc.contently.com. 11/27/15
Since earning her MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2012, Jen Hinst-White’s essays and stories have appeared in The Common, The Missouri Review, The Southampton Review, Image Journal, Consequence Magazine, Cordella, and elsewhere, along with a novella, A Fortune, published by Big Fiction in 2014. Her first novel is the coming-of-age story of a young queer woman aspiring to become a tattoo artist in working-class Long Island of the 1980s, when the tattoo industry was mostly closed to women … and Jen is about to read to you from it. 1/28/13, 6/27/16, 1/23/19, 11//27/19
Jenn Hollmeyer writes and paints in the Chicago area. She was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, a prizewinner in the Bevel Summers Short Short Fiction Award competition, and, earlier this year, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for her story collection, Orders of Protection, published recently by the University of North Texas Press. Jenn’s stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, West Branch Wired, Post Road, Salamander, AGNI online, and other journals. She is a founding editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal and holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Learn more at jennhollmeyer.com. 12/17/19
Michael Homolka is the author of Antiquity, winner the 2015 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. His poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Boulevard, Antioch Review, Agni, and Poetry Daily. A graduate of Bennington College’s MFA program, he currently teaches high school students in New York City. 11/12/12, 9/26/16
Ann Hood is the bestselling author of the novels The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was named one of the top ten books of 2008 and was a NYT Editors Choice. Her new memoir, Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, was published in August 2017 by WW Norton. 8/28/17
Ailish Hopper is the author of Dark~Sky Society (2014), selected by David St. John as runner-up for the New Issues prize, and the chapbook, Bird in the Head (2005), selected by Jean Valentine for the Center for Book Arts Prize. Individual poems have appeared in AGNI, APR, Blackbird, Harvard Review online, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tidal Basin Review, and other places. Her essays on art and literature that deal with race have appeared in or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Volta, and the anthology, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. A native of Washington, DC, she has received support from the MacDowell Colony, Maryland State Arts Council, and Yaddo. Hopper teaches at Goucher College and in the visual art MFA program at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 4/27/15
Jeremy Horton is a writer living in Manhattan. He is originally from southern Mississippi and his home is the setting for his fiction. Horton’s interests include literature, film, languages, and a finely crafted hierarchy of neuroses. 6/26/17
Hannah Howard is the author of the memoir, Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen, which came out in April. If all goes well, she will graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars next month. She writes for publications including New York Magazine, Salon and Thrillist. Hannah lives in New York City and loves stinky cheese. 3/27/17, 5/28/18
Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the novels, The Loved Ones, and Wavemaker II, a New York Times Notable Book, and the collection Double Happiness, which earned a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have been published in A Public Space, The Georgia Review, The Mississippi Review, The St. Ann’s Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares and have been collected in The Dictionary of Failed Relationships, Object Lessons: The Paris Review presents The Art of the Short Story, and 2011 Pushcart Prize XXXV. She lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, New York. For more information, please go to: www.mbhughesbooks.com. 7/27/15
Erica Hunt’s most recent work, published in 2013, is a new chapbook, A day and its approximates from Chax Books. She is a poet and essayist: the author of prose works, Local History and Arcade, as well as two chapbooks, Piece Logic and Time Flies Right Before the Eyes. Other bits have been published in Boundary 2, Conjunctions, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree, and in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, The Politics of Poetic Form, and other various anthologies. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation. 9/30/12, 11/24/14
Kay Iguh is a fiction writer and graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She completed a four-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center in June 2016. Her short story “House Girl” won the 2016 Disquiet Literary Prize and was published in Guernica. She is also a 2016 Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellow. She currently teaches creative writing to high school students. A native Nigerian, she grew up in Houston and now lives in Brooklyn. 2/27/17
Didi Jackson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Water~Stone Review, and Passages North, among other publications. Her manuscript, Before the Body, was a finalist for the 2016 Alice James Book Award, a finalist for the 2016 Autumn House Press Book Award, and a finalist for the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize offered by Persea Books. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2013. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont teaching Poetry and the Visual Arts and Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. 9/26/16
Leigh Jackson is a former newspaper reporter and a proud graduate of Bennington’s MFA program. She lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she seeks a perfect balance of family and writing. She hasn’t found one so far, but she’s optimistic. 11/28/16
This week, Major Jackson received the 2016 Vermont Book Award for his book, Roll Deep, published last year. He is the author of three other books of poetry: Holding Company (2010); Hoops (2007); and Leaving Saturn (2002), whichwon the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a creative arts fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and been included in several volumes of Best American Poetry. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Jackson is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. 9/26/16
Nancy Jainchill is a psychologist who returned to writing after many years, receiving an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013. She’s read on NPR, was a contributor to Every Father’s Daughter, An Anthology (McPherson Pub., 2015), and her work has appeared in The Woodstock Times, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Calyx, Entropy, the Freestate Review, Brevity, The Women’s Review of Books, and the Albany Times Union. She is working on an essay collection about “hidden” women, whose lives have been groundbreaking in their attention to the politics of sex, sexuality, and gender parity, while she explores her own relationship to sexuality and feminism. 10/28/13, 9/24/18
TJ Jarrett is a writer and software developer from Nashville, Tennessee. Her recent work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, VQR, West Branch and others. Her work has been anthologized in Language Lessons from Third Man Books and Best American Non-Required Reading 2015. Jarrett’s debut collection, Ain’t No Grave, was published with New Issues Press (2013) and her second, Zion, winner of the 2013 Crab Orchard Open Competition, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in the fall of 2014. 4/24/17
Morgan Jerkins 6/22/16
Alden Jones is the author of three books: a travel memoir, The Blind Masseuse (2013); a story collection, Unaccompanied Minors (2014); and The Wanting Was a Wilderness, a hybrid work of literary criticism and personal essay forthcoming shortly. Her awards include the New American Fiction Prize, the Lascaux Book Prize, two Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Foreword Book of the Year Award, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award longlist. Jones was recently awarded the Alan Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching by Emerson College, where she teaches creative writing and cultural studies. She is co-founder and co-director of the Cuba Writers Program. 11/25/13, 8/22/16, 8/28/17, 8/27/18
Jamie-Lee Josselyn, a June ’11 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, is an Associate Director and instructor for the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also directs the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, Cleaver Magazine, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is the host of the literary podcast, Dead Parents Society. Jamie-Lee lives in South Philadelphia with her gentleman friend, her dog, and her two cats. 6/24/13, 1/22/20
David Kalish is a novelist, playwright, and recovering journalist. He earned his MFA at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars. His short fiction appears in numerous literary journals, his nonfiction in The Writer’s Chronicle, and a short film of his, Regular Guy, was selected into film festivals here and abroad. Before Bennington, he was a journalist at The Associated Press for twelve years, resulting in hundreds of articles in major newspapers. Kalish is working on a second novel, Stoner Hero, and a Latin-themed comedic musical entitled, The Gringo Who Stole Christmas. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, daughter, and two dogs, Tilly and Luna. 9/30/13
Mary Beth Kelly is a first-term Bennington MFA student, reading nonfiction. As a clinical social worker, she conducts a private practice in psychotherapy on the Upper West Side where she has lived since 1976 and raised a family. Kelly is also an advocate for livable streets and serves on the Board of Transportation Alternatives. 2/17/14
Tara Kelly earned a Masters in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2014. Since then, she has been revising her thesis, as she now views much of what she wrote very differently. She is a fan of Abigail Thomas and her vignette style of writing. Tara lives in Millbrook, NY. 10/28/13, 10/22/18
Miranda Kennedy is the author of the book Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India, a reported memoir that looks at the lives of women in a changing India. She is the Senior Editor of NPR’s Morning Edition in Washington, DC, and is working on a second memoir about religious belief. Kennedy also holds writing workshops for graduate students at American University, and teaches long-form journalism to undergraduates at the University of Maryland. More can be found at mirandakennedy.com. 10/24/16
Dana Kinstler has won fiction prizes from Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, and the Southern Indiana Review, and her essays have been published in Good-Bye to All That, the Sunday London Telegraph, and several anthologies. She has degrees from Bennington and Brown and has taught at Bard College and Marist College. A 3rdgeneration native New Yorker, Kinstler now resides with her husband and two daughters in the Hudson River Valley. 1/23/16
Brian Jerrold Koester holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared in AGNI, HeartWood, Streetlight Magazine, Cold Creek review Right Hand Pointing, Indiana Literature Journal, and elsewhere. Brian lives in Lexington, Mass. and has been a freelance cellist. 1/22/18
Sheila Kohler is the author of nine novels, most recently The Bay of Foxes published by Penguin, which followed Love Child in 2011 and Becoming Jane Eyre in 2009, as well as three short story collections. She has received an O. Henry Award twice, the Open Voice Award, the Smart Family Foundation Prize, The Willa Cather Prize, and the Antioch Review Prize. Her work has been translated and published widely abroad and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications too numerous to mention. Kohler currently teaches at Princeton and the Bennington Writing Seminars. 1/28/13
Moscow-born Nina Kossman is a painter, sculptor, bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, and playwright. A graduate of Bennington College, she is the author of two books of poems in Russian, as well as the translator of two volumes of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems. Her other books include Behind the Border (HarperCollins 1994), a collection of stories about her Moscow childhood, Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press 2001), and a novel. More information is available at ninakossman.com 5/22/19
Parks Kugle writes a variety of styles, including fantasy, realism, and historical fiction. He has lived in Austin and New Orleans, where he worked for media companies and non-profits. In New Orleans, he edited and published a small zine titled Provocative. He is in the process of editing his first novel. Kugle currently attends Sarah Lawrence College for his Fiction MFA, therefore he lives in the Bronx. 10/23/17
Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of essays, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Graywolf, 2010), which received the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Among her many accomplishments, are notable mentions in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2007; 2010) and Best American Essays (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013). 3/31/14
Becca J.R. Lachman edited the 2013 anthology A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, and is the author of two poetry collections, Other Acreage (2015) and The Apple Speaks (2012). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in such places as Consequence Magazine, Image Journal, and Brevity, and her choral pieces are published by the Lorenz Corporation. By day, Lachman serves as the communications officer for the Athens County Public Libraries in SE Ohio. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2011. 6/25/12, 4/24/17
Steven LaFond is a writer and podcast producer whose work has appeared in apt, The Drum, Little Fiction, The New Guard, and elsewhere. His most recent project is the Witchever Path Fiction Anthology podcast. 11/25/13, 11/27/17, 12/17/19
Danielle Decatur Lawrence is a fiction writer in the middle of her second term as a graduate student at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s also a creative director for an advertising agency in the city; you’ve probably seen some of her work on television or flipping through a magazine. 10/23/17
Woody Lewis is the author of Three Lost Souls: Stories about Race, Class and Loneliness. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI online, CONSEQUENCE magazine, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he spent most of his adult life in northern and southern California, returning in 2010 to New York City, where he is at work on a memoir and a novel about Silicon Valley. 7/29/13, 1/23/17
Julia Lichtblau writes fiction, essays, and criticism. Her work is forthcoming in American Fiction 17 and has recently appeared in The American Scholar, Blackbird, and The Common. Her story, ‘Deserters,’ was a finalist for Narrative’s fall 2016 contest. A former financial journalist, she is working on a novel set in Côte d’Ivoire, teaches at Drew University, and is book review editor for The Common. She earned an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College and lives in Brooklyn. 5/29/14, 1/23/17, 8/14/19
Timothy Liu is the author of such books as Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse, For Dust Thou Art, Of Thee I Sing, Hard Evidence, Say Goodnight, Burnt Offerings, and Vox Angelica. He edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. In addition to being translated into ten languages, his poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Liu is an English professor at William Paterson University and a Core Faculty member at the Bennington College Graduate Writing Seminars. He has also taught at Hampshire College, Cornell College, University of California Berkeley, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of Michigan, and Tulane University. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. 12/6/11
Born in Brooklyn, Phillip Lopate is the author of three essay collections: Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body; two novels: Confessions of Summer and The Rug Merchant; a pair of novellas; two poetry collections; and a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being with Children. Lopate has edited anthologies on a wide range of topics. His collection, The Art of the Personal Essay, is perhaps the best in its field. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, Hofstra, New York University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Lopate directs the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. He has two books forthcoming in March 2013 from The Free Press/Simon & Schuster, Portrait Inside My Head (personal essays) and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. 2/25/13
Marcia Loughran came to poetry early, winning honorable mention in a sixth grade haiku contest. She took a thirty-year hiatus and then stumbled back via The New School, The 92nd Street Y, and the Bennington Writing Seminars (graduate, June 2013.) In real life, she is a Nurse Practitioner in substance abuse research. Loughran lives in Queens and hides out in the Catskills on weekends. She is grateful to be included with these wonderful poets here tonight. 8/26/13, 8/14/19
Fiona Maazel is the author of the novels Last Last Chance, Woke Up Lonely, and A Little More Human. She is winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. 5/22/17
Sara Majka’s debut collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, was published by Graywolf Press / A Public Space Books this year. She studied writing at Bennington College and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She currently lives in Queens with her young son. 7/29/13, 5/23/16
Kelly Marages is a New York City writer and magazine editor who has never lived in Brooklyn. Her essays, cultural criticism, and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Marie Claire, Us Weekly, Paste, Giant, and Men’s Healthamong other dead/dying print publications; she has also written on the internets at Vulture.com, Glamour.com, and other dot-coms. She once wrote a monthly horoscope column under the pen name Luna C. As a Libra, she hopes you will fall in platonic love with her after learning this. Marages graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Bennington in June 2015, and, along with fellow grad Agatha French, is cofounder of the forthcoming literary project Four Eyes. 9/27/15
Katie Marya is originally from Atlanta, Georgia and holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College. She received her BA in Spanish. Her work has appeared in The Rio Review andPrairie Schooner and is forthcoming in North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Five Points (as the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry). She was recently recognized with a 2017 Fall Fellowship at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She lives and teaches in Lincoln, Nebraska. Pryor also loves dancing mambo style salsa and while she’s in NY, she’d love someone to take her out dancing. 12/18/17
Leslie Maslow’s short stories and reviews have appeared in Tin House, Open City, Anderbo and other journals. From 2014-15 she wrote a column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency called ‘The Hidden Rich’ under the pen name Jane Dough. She’s currently working on a series of essays about inequality, economics, and the literary imagination. 8/31/11, 3/27/17
Jen Mathy wrote for WGN-TV in Chicago and has placed stories with The Chicago Tribune, Orange County Today, and elsewhere. She wrote the prose and poetry for An Expat Journey in Singapore, a book of photographs about the island nation. Jen is an independent marketing communications consultant and manages social media for Bennington Writing Seminars, among others. She is at work on her first novel. 6/27/16, 2/26/20
Alice Mattison is a widely acclaimed author and longtime writing teacher. Conscience is her seventh novel. The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale appeared in 2016. Her earlier novels include The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and When We Argued All Night, and she is also the author of four books of stories and a collection of poems. Twelve of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and other work has been published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Ecotone and has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. She has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and, for more than twenty years, in the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College. 5/26/14, 3/13/19
Pam Matz is a poet, librarian, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Memorious, Painted Bride Quarterly, Bloodroot, and Shadowgraph Quarterly. She received herBennington Writing Seminars MFA in Spring 2010 and is now writing a thesis about a 12th century poet, in pursuit of a master’s in Medieval Studies at the Harvard Extension School. 9/25/19
Dan McDermott had a dysfunctional upbringing conducive to punk rock angst. He spent his teens and early twenties singing in raucous bands and a subsequent decade as rock and roll journalist for numerous publications. His fiction has appeared recently in Ploughshares and The Southampton Review, and he received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2018. 12/17/18
Leslie McGrath is a poet and literary interviewer. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, she is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (2009), a poetry collection, and two chapbooks, Toward Anguish (2007) and By the Windpipe (2014.) McGrath’s most recent book is a satiric novella in verse, Out From the Pleiades (Jaded Ibis, 2014.) Her poems have appeared most recently in The Awl, AGNI, Salamander, and The Common. She teaches creative writing and literature at Central Connecticut State University and is series editor of The Tenth Gate, a poetry imprint of The Word Works Press (Washington, DC). 12/29/14
Askold Melnyczuk’s first novel, What Is Told, was a New York Times Notable Book; his second, The Ambassador of the Dead, was selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times; the most recent, The House of Widows, was chosen by the American Libraries Association’s Booklist as an Editor’s Choice. He’s received numerous awards for his fiction, as well as for his editorial work as founding editor of Agni and Arrowsmith Press. Melnyczuk’s currently finishing a new novel, Recovering Virgins. An Associate Professor in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, he also teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and has taught as well at Boston University and Harvard. 3/30/15
Susan Scarf Merrell is the author most recently of Shirley: a novel about the writer Shirley Jackson. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton, where she also directs the Southampton Writers Conference, and is program director of the new post-MFA novel-polishing venture, BookEnds. 5/27/13, 9/29/14, 12/18/17
Linda Michel-Cassidy’s writing has appeared in Jabberwock, Harpur Palate, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. She works for the Mill Valley library and the literary reading series Why There Are Words, and is a contributing editor at Entropy Magazine. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and another, in Visual Arts, from the California College of the Arts. She recently served a decade of voluntary exile in rural northern New Mexico, and now lives on a houseboat in California. 12/26/16
Jennifer A. Miller concluded, as an undergraduate English major, that there must be something better to do with her life than to write poetry. Not realizing how very wrong she was about this, she got a J.D. from Columbia University and practiced law in California. Currently she is busy rectifying her error in her first semester of the MFA program at Bennington. 11/12/12
Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs. For fourteen years, Miller has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. In April 2015, Miller was inducted into the Washington, DC Hall of Fame.In 2016, he received the AWPGeorge Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the DCMayor’s Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. Miller currently serves on the faculty at the University of Houston/Victoria and hosts the weekly morning radio show On the Margin, which airson WPFW-FM 89.3. The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, published in 2016 by Willow Books, is a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his career as a poet. Miller’s most recent book is If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press. 8/25/14, 7/23/18
Sloane Miller, MFA, MSW, LMSW, holds graduate degrees from New York University and Bennington College. Since 2006, she has maintained a popular blog called, Please Don’t Pass The Nuts, about living well with asthma, allergies, and life-threatening food allergies. In 2007, Miller created a private practice helping those with severe dietary restrictions manage everyday life. In 2011, John Wiley & Sons published her lifestyle guide: Allergic Girl: Adventures in Living Well with Food Allergies. A nationally recognized expert and frequent public speaker, this is her first piece of creative nonfiction since 2000 to have nothing to do with food allergies. 7/29/13
Monica Minott graduated with an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a Chartered Accountant, operating her own firm in Jamaica. She received two awards in the Jamaican National Book Development Council’s annual literary competitions for book-length poetry collections. Her works has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe Caribbean Journal, Cultural Voice Magazine, SX Salon, Jubilation, The Squaw Valley Review, BIM magazine, and Coming Up Hot, an anthology featuring eight new Caribbean poets. Her first collection, Kumina Queen, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2016 and her second, Zion Roses, will be out early next year. 4/23/18
Geri Modell 12/18/17, 1/23/19
Rena J. Mosteirin is the co-author of Moonbit(punctum books, 2019), an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Her novella Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008) won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Her chapbook Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) explores Moby-Dick through erasure poetry. She is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College. 12/17/19
Robert Moulthrop likes to say his career was kickstarted by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2005, he received the New York Fringe Outstanding Playwriting Award for his play, Half Life. His interest in playwriting has resulted in some 15 plays and 20 one-acts. His stories have appeared in such journals as Reed, Berkeley Fiction Review, Confrontation, Eclipse, The MacGuffin, and Sou’Wester. His story ‘Four Stories From the Quiet’ won first prize in Literal Latte’s 2010 Fiction Contest. And now Moulthrop’s debut short story collection, To Tell You The Truth, has been “highly recommended for followers of short fiction.” A graduate of Brandeis University (BA, Music) and the Catholic University of America (MA, Theatre), Robert lives and works in New York City. 5/19/14
Ruth Mukwana is a fiction writer from Uganda, an aid worker currently working for the United Nations in New York, and a mother of an eight-year-old daughter. She’s a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and holds a Bachelors degree in Law from Makerere (ma-Care-ray) University. Her short stories have appeared in Solstice Magazine, Black Warriors Review, Consequence Magazine and The Compassion Anthology, and Speak the Magazine. 11/24/14, 11/27/19
Unni Nair graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars earlier this year in June. As an undergrad he read Philsosophy, and now he works as a freelance photographer and translator. He lives in The Bronx and has been published in The Indypendant, India Abroad, Creative Image Magazine, The Leaflet, American Bazaar, and The Indian Express. Writing this bio was harder than anything he wrote at Bennington. 10/23/19
Mara Naselli is an editor and writer. Her essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Agni, Ninth Letter, Your Impossible Voice, 3 Quarks Daily, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013 and is a recipient of a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. 2/23/15
YahNé Ndgo is a writer, singer, and activist. Her art and her advocacy focus on the restoration of equity among all living beings and the embodiment of love. In her work, she acknowledges struggle and suffering while concentrating on healing, she creates space for the voices of those who are typically marginalized, and she strives to eradicate poverty in her lifetime. She is Chief Visionary Officer of Deep Blu Womyn Company, a company of women artist administrators. Her daughter, Ishara, will be eighteen in a few weeks and is graduating high school. She is a singer, musician, and writer as well, and will study music and creative writing as an undergraduate in the fall. 5/25/15
Jimmy Newborg is a graduate of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. His work as appeared in Little Fiction, Critical Flame, and elsewhere. 2/27/12, 11/27/15, 5/28/18
Titi Nguyen’s essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New York Times, Tin House blog, Paris Review Daily, Witness, and elsewhere. She earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has been the recipient of a tuition scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and was Crab Orchard Review‘s inaugural Feature Award in Literary Nonfiction. She is currently a regular contributor to the Ploughshares blog. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Titi lives in New York City. She loves a good ghost story. 11/24/14, 3/13/19
As a poet, Will Nixon has published three books, My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse, Love in the City of Grudges, and Acrostic Woodstock. With Michael Perkins, he has co-authored Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town and The Pocket Guide to Woodstock. 11/28/16
Conor O’Brien was raised in suburban Connecticut and now lives and works in urban New York. He graduated from New York University in 2013 with a degree in English Literature and is currently a second-term student of the Bennington Writing Seminars. As yet, he has no publishing credits to speak of. 1/23/17
As an actor, Michael O’Keefe has garnered both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. He’s appeared in the films, Eye In the Sky, Michael Clayton, Frozen River, The Pledge, Ironweed, The Great Santini, and Caddyshack. Television audiences will recognize him as CIA Agent John Redmond on Homeland and remember him as ‘Fred’ on Roseanne. He’s appeared on Broadway in Reckless, Side Man, The Fifth of July and Mass Appeal for which he received a Theater World Award. As a writer, his lyrics were in the Grammy-winning song, ‘Longing in Their Hearts’, composed and sung by Bonnie Raitt. His writing has appeared in magazines such as BOMB, Mindful, Lake Affect, and Chaparral. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. O’Keefe has been a Zen practitioner for almost thirty years and is a Dharma Holder in the Zen Peacemaker Order. 4/25/16
Jeremy Oldfield 8/25/11
Miriam O’Neal is a writer and teacher of writing. Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals including, AGNI, Blackbird Journal, The Guidebook, Marlboro Review, Ragazine, and Southern Poetry Review among others. She has taught in traditional and non-traditional settings, from universities to prisons to The Boys and Girls Club. Her first book of poems, We Start with What We’re Given, is out from Kelsay Press this month (July 2018). She also translates Italian poetry and was a Beginning Translation Fellow at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). She earned her MFA at the Bennington Writing Programs and lives in Plymouth, MA. 8/25/14, 7/23/18
Cheryl Pappas is a writer from Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Tin House’s Open Bar, Essay Daily, and more. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. She can be found at cherylpappas.net and @fabulistpappas. 11/27/17
Catherine Parnell is the Senior Associate Editor of Consequence Magazine. Her publications include the non-fiction book, The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, interviews and blog posts in Barnhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Redivider, TSR: The Southampton Review, Post Road, The Baltimore Review, roger, and many others. 12/28/17, 4/24/19
Seth Pase earned a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College where his short fiction was recognized in the annual Senior Writing Contest. Since earning an MAT in English from Union College, he has worked in education; currently, he leads writing across the curriculum initiatives in his role as Director of the Writing Center at Excelsior College. He earned an MFA from Bennington College in 2016 and writes character-driven fiction focused on the topical, the fantastic, and the confused. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York with his wife, daughter, stepdaughter, two murderous cats, and a fancy little dog named Duncan Idaho. 2/23/15
Rachel Pastan is the author of the novels Alena (Riverhead, 2014), Lady of the Snakes (Harcourt, 2004), and This Side of Married (Viking, 2002). Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, Mademoiselle, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other places. She is a member of the Core Faculty in Fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. 9/29/14
Oona Patrick earned an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Salamander, and elsewhere, and she has received Notable Essay mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. She helped start the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon in 2011 and published an anthology last year called Behind the Stars, More Stars: The Tagus Press/Disquiet Collection of New Luso-American Writing. Most recently, Oona guest-edited of an issue of the St. Petersburg Review’s Springhouse Journal featuring all women writers in translation from Portuguese. 6/24/13, 12/28/15, 7/24/17, 1/22/20
Jeffrey Perkins received his MFA from Bennington College in 2009. His poems have been published in Memorious, The Massachusetts Review, The Cortland Review, The Southampton Review, Rhino, and Melancholy Hyperbole, among other journals. He is also the co-author with Frances Moore Lappe of the nonfiction work, You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear published by Tarcher/Penguin. Currently, Perkins teaches poetry to adults in Brookline, Massachusetts and is director of marketing at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 3/30/15
Originally from rural north Idaho, Dana Perry is a Brooklyn-based freelance grant writer and copywriter for numerous nonprofit organizations, individual artists, and small businesses. For the past 10 years, she’s been involved with a monthly writing salon. Perry holds an MA in Sociology from The New School and is currently studying clinical herbalism at ArborVitae in NYC (so lately she’s been writing a lot about plants). 12/26/16
Susan Petrie is from Albany and spends a lot of time wandering unmarked roads in Upstate New York and the Hudson Valley. She has recently discovered Robert Macfarlane, and (for better or worse) Instagram. Professionally, she works as a nonfiction book publisher, and will be finishing her MFA in poetry in January. Susan is currently working on a book-length collaborative project called Hundred Mile Home. 9/25/17
Sarah Phillips writes
poetry sometimes. (Sometimes
she steals lines from friends.) 12/30/13
William Pierce graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2003 and now edits AGNI with Sven Birkerts. His fiction has appeared in Granta, American Literary Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He also writes essays on literature: a long one about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle will appear next month in The Los Angeles Review of Books. 3/30/15
Julia Pistell is an essayist and actor in Hartford, Connecticut. She hosts the nationally popular book criticism podcast, “Literary Disco,” with two other Bennington alumni, works full time at the Mark Twain House & Museum, and owns an improv comedy studio. Pistell has written for the Coachella Review, the Newark Star-Ledger, Writers’ Houses, and, once on a dare, she wrote a feature-length profile on Mark Twain’s cats for Cat Fancy, the world’s premier cat magazine. 6/24/13
Jo Pitkin received a BA in creative writing and literature from Kirkland College and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of The Measure (Finishing Line Press), Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York (The History Press) and Commonplace Invasions (Ireland’s Salmon Poetry). She edited the landmark anthology Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community (Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press). Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies such as: The New York Review of Books, Little Star, Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, Salamander, Stone Canoe, Nimrod International Journal, and Southern Humanities Review; and Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Pitkin lives in the Hudson River Valley in a former public schoolhouse built in 1830. 5/19/14
Rolf Potts is best known for promoting the ethic of independent travel, and his book on the subject, Vagabonding, has been thorough fourteen printings and numerous translations. His essays have appeared in venues such as National Geographic Traveler, The New Yorker, and The Best American Travel Writing series. His newest book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, garnered Italy’s prestigious Chatwin Prize. His home is a 30-acre farm in Saline County, Kansas, though currently he is a writer-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Potts is June ’11 graduate of the Bennington Writers Seminars. 4/30/12, 3/26/18
Kerri Quinn’s Ph.D. is in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her short stories have appeared in The Santa Monica Review, descant, The Apple Valley Review, and Cutthroat Literary Journal. Quinn lives, writes, and drinks too much coffee in New York City. 12/26/16
Meaghan Quinn is the author of Slow Dance Bullets, published by Route Seven Press this year (2019). She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has studied at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as The Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize, is a recipient of the Nancy Penn Holsenbeck Prize and a member of the Cape Cod Writers Center and has served as the Feature Poet of Anti-Heroin Chic’s Spring Issue. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, The Puritan, Off the Coast, Adrienne, Free State Review, and elsewhere. 9/25/19
Adriana Rambay Fernández grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Dominican immigrants. She is a current Jack Jones Literary Arts Fellow and a recipient of the Bennington MFA Fiction Prize. Adriana is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a collection of poetry. She teaches yoga and meditation and lives in Virginia Beach. 6/18, 8/28/19
Vassiliki Rapti holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College and co-Chair of the Ludics Seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She is the author of the monographs “Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond” and “Air, Water, Earth, Fire in the Poetry of Nikos Engonopoulos” and several poetry collections including “Transitorium”. She is also the Director of the International Translation Committee of Levure Litteraire and founder and director of the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop. 8/27/18
Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. He is the author of Fealty(Eyewear, 2018; Diode Editions, 2019), a finalist for the American Book Fest’s Best Book Award. He is also the founding editor of Rascal: a Journal of Ecology, Literature, and Art. His recent work can be found in The American Scholar, The Matador Review, Amaryllis, Scintilla, and Fugue. His awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, the Fortnight Poetry Prize, and a Whisper River Poetry Prize. He lives in Harlem with his wife, three cats and a Labradetter. Their bed, like any good home of the heart, is frequently overcrowded. Visit rickyray.co and rascaljournal.com for more. 11/26/18
Mary Ellen Redmond earned her MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June ’11. She was a regional finalist for 2011 Cape Cod Cultural Center’s poetry contest, as well as a 2010 finalist for the NCTE Poet of the Year Contest. Her interview with poet Gregory Orr was recently published in the 2011 Fall/Winter issue of the The Drunken Boat. A former member of the Cape Cod Poetry Slam Team, her poems have been published in A Sense of Place; World of Water, World of Sand: A Cape Cod Collection of Poetry, Fiction and Memoir; 5am; The Drunken Boat; The Larcom Review and RATTLE. She is in her eighteenth year teaching English on Cape Cod, Mass. 6/25/12
Camille Renshaw has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in publications such as The Mississippi Review, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice. She has been on a publication hiatus for the last decade, while she has worked to revive deteriorating downtown districts and their artistic communities nationwide. Her recent return to writing and her ongoing urban real estate investments are focused on cities and their stories. Camille lives in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. 5/26/14
Sue Repko graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2012. Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 & 2017. Her essay, ‘What A Bullet Can Do,’ just won the 2019 Maine Literary Award for short nonfiction. She lives in Maine and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy. Sue is at work on a memoir about her gunsmith father, a shooting from her childhood, and guns in America. 8/25/11, 6/26/19
Mickey Revenaugh is of two minds about many things. Her 2017 Bennington MFA is dual genre, Nonfiction and Fiction. She’s trying to get one book published about how much she hates paper, and is working on another one about marijuana. Mickey’s writing has appeared in Cagibi, Cleaver, Catapult, Chautauqua, Lunch Ticket, and The Tishman Review, among others. Mickey was a finalist for the 2018 New Millennium Awards, the 2017 Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, and 2017 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award. She divides her time between literary pursuits and a day job in international education technology, while striving to embrace duality. 1/26/15, 1/23/19, 6/26/19, 8/14/19
David Rigsbee is the author of School of the Americas and Not Alone in My Dancing: Essays and Reviews, as well as the forthcoming This Much I Can Tell You, all from Black Lawrence Press. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Literature, and awards from The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of critical studies of Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. Rigsbee is contributing editor to The Cortland Review. 12/26/16
Walter M. Robinson isn’t quite himself today, and hasn’t been quite himself since about 3:45pm on June 15th when, in the corridor outside an airless classroom on the third floor of a red-shingled building in southern Vermont, Susan Cheever assured him he didn’t have to be. On June 14th, he had been a physician and professor of medical ethics as well as the English–speaking expert in a subject most people would prefer he not discuss. He has published sixty-one articles in various medical journals; he bets you five dollars no one you know has read them all. 9/30/12
Isabel Rose is the author of the novel, The J.A.P Chronicles, published by Doubleday. Her nonfiction has been published in various anthologies and her blog, The Rose Note, is followed by 100,000 followers. In addition to writing, Isabel is also a recording artist whose most recent album, Trouble in Paradise, was released by Sony. Her many videos are available for viewing on YouTube. Isabel also works as a professional organizer, so if you need help, reach out! Isabelbydesign.com. 6/27/16
Andy Rosenzweig spent 30 years fighting crime and corruption in New York City before undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing, which he earned from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2012. His career was chronicled in Philip Gourevitch’s New Yorker article and book, A Cold Case. Rosenzweig has published two detective novels, Harry at the Precipice and Wiremen and is currently at work on a sequel to his first, to be called Harry’s on the Farm. He lives in White Plains with his wife, Mary. 6/25/18
Judy Rowley, who was born in Australia, began her writing life while living in South Korea as a ‘trailing spouse.’ To deepen her commitment to poetry and literature she completed a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at Manhattanville, NY and an MFA in Poetry at Bennington Writing Seminars. She writes poetry and essays, which have been published in several journals, and has recently published a memoir called Expected Home. 10/26/15, 5/28/18
Michael Ruhlman is the author of a dozen narrative nonfiction books. In Small Measures is his first fiction effort. His most recent book is Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. For more information, go to Ruhlman.com. 8/28/17
David Ryan is the author of the story collection, Animals in Motion, and the hybrid memoir/criticism Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Epiphany, The Southampton Review, Diagram, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New England College. 9/29/14, 7/27/15, 2/26/20
Hugh Ryan is a writer, curator, and speaker living in New York City. His work about queer politics, culture, and history has appeared in such venues as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, VICE, Slate, and Condé Nast’s new LGBTQ publication, them. His book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, was published to great acclaim by St. Martin’s Press in Spring 2019. He graduated in January 2010 from the Bennington Writing Seminars. 4/30/12, 3/28/16, 6/26/19
Viplav Saini 8/14/19
Christopher Salerno is the author of four books of poems and the editor of Saturnalia Books. His newest collection, Sun & Urn, was selected by Thomas Lux for the Georgia Poetry Prize and was recently published by University of Georgia Press. A New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow, his poems have appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Guernica, Fence, and elsewhere. Salerno is an Associate Professor at William Paterson University in NJ, where he teaches in the undergraduate and MFA Programs in Creative and Professional Writing. 11/12/12, 12/30/13, 4/24/17
Cathy Salibian’s early career as an international currency smuggler ended when she was toilet trained and her mother stopped tucking contraband bills between her diapers on transatlantic flights. Born in Casablanca, she grew up on Long Island watching her Armenian family haul great hanks of lamb out of the trunk of their silver-finned Buick. Her sincerest childhood wish was to be normal like other people. This was not to be. Salibian has worked as a patient educator at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinics, an editor at the Rochester Business Journal, and as a freelance marketing communications consultant. She graduated in June 2014 from the Bennington Writing Seminars and persists in the belief that MFA stands for Most Famous Author. 12/28/15
Hayden Saunier is the author of four poetry collections: How to Wear This Body, Tips for Domestic Travel, Say Luck, and Field Trip to the Underworld. Her work has received the Pablo Neruda Prize, The Rattle Poetry Prize, The Gell Poetry Award, and the Robert Fraser Award and been published in a wide variety of journals. She is an actor with extensive theatre credits, having recently appeared in Mindhunter, House of Cards, Outsiders, and Do No Harm. Hayden holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 4/28/14, 1/22/18
Julie Scarr 1/23/19
Dagmar Schnau
Liesl Schwabe directs the Writing Program at Yeshiva College and recently returned from serving as a 2019 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Kolkata, India, where she taught personal narrative at Presidency, the oldest “modern” university in Asia. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and Creative Nonfiction, among other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children. 2/25/13, 10/23/19
David Lerner Schwartz is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he was a recipient of the MFA Alumni Writer’s Grant, and a BA from Tufts University with high honors. His work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, New York Magazine, among others. He works as an assistant fiction editor at the Four Way Review and teaches at The New School. 1/22/18, 1/23/19
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a Brooklyn native, is the author of twenty-two books, which include works of fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry, as well as translations from Italian. Her first novel, Rough Strife, was nominated for a National Book Award. Notable books of hers are the coming-of-age novel, Leaving Brooklyn, a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee; the recently published memoir, Not Now, Voyager; and just out this January, a poetry collection, See You in the Dark. Schwartz is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Manhattan. 2/27/12,9/27/15
A Pushcart-nominated writer, Aurvi Sharma has been awarded the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Prairie Schooner Essay Prize, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the AWP Emerging Writer Prize. Sharma’s work has also appeared in Fourth Genre and Essay Daily. She recently received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship. 3/28/16
Julia Shipley spent her twenties in a vagabond college program called ‘The Bus,’ between stints as a farmhand on organic farms and dairies. She completed an MFA from The Bennington College Writing Seminars in January 2002 while serving as an office assistant at the Vermont Studio Center. Her first book of poems, The Academy of Hay, won the 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Adam’s Mark, named a 2014 Best Book About New England by the Boston Globe. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, FIELD, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, Poet Lore, and Verse Daily. Shipley’s essays can be found in December Magazine, Fourth Genre, Gettysburg Review, and Orion Magazine. She practices freelance journalism on her subsistence farm in Northern Vermont, where she is at work on a nonfiction book. 10/26/15
Ricco Siasoco’s stories and essays have appeared in AGNI, Joyland, and The North American Review, among others. In 2013, he was selected as an NYC Emerging Writer Fellow from The Center for Fiction. Ricco has taught at Teachers College and Boston College. Currently, he’s at work on a book of essays. 11/24/14, 1/23/17
Jessica Silvester is a senior editor at New York Magazine and a former editor at O, The Oprah Magazine. Her work has appeared in those publications, as well as The New York Times. She has appeared on The Today Show, Good Day New York, NY1, and WNBC. 7/24/17
Christine Simek lives and writes in the Hudson Valley. 2/17/14
Katie Slezas is a lovely mess. She graduated Bennington in June of 2014. She specializes in nonlinear memoir, mental illness, divorce, laughing aloud in public, and other forms of self-preservation. 10/27/14
Dustin Beall Smith is the recipient of the 2007 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in nonfiction for his book, Key Grip: A Memoir of Endless Consequences (Houghton Mifflin 2008). His essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, The Louisville Review, New York Times Sunday Magazine, River Teeth, The Sun, Writing on the Edge, and elsewhere. His work has received Notable Mentions in Best American Essays in 2008 and 2009, and in Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses, 2010. Smith teaches creative writing and first-year seminars at Gettysburg. 4/2/14
James Adams Smith writes nonfiction, humor, and short stories. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Defenestration Magazine, and Coda Quarterly. He is a regular contributor to Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, a queer magazine. He lives in Delaware, where he is studying to become an occupational therapist. 2/25/13, 2/27/19
William Bryan Smith was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1971. Smith’s novel, Free Range Men, is available from Main Street Rag. His novel, The Late Great Thor McHugh, was published by Aardwolfe Books and can be found on Amazon Kindle. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is a graduate of Mansfield University. Will’s humor writing has appeared at Points in Case, Robotbutt, and Medium. 8/27/12, 9/30/13, 7/27/15, 3/13/19
Maura Anthony Snell is Co-founder of and Poetry Editor at The Tishman Review, (www.thetishmanreview.com), Managing Editor at Language for a New Century, www.languageforanewcentury.com, and teaches poetry writing and critique to incarcerated teen girls. She earned an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2014. Snell’s poetry has been published in print and online, but most recently in the Spring 2015 issue of Brain,Child Magazine. She lives in Westborough, MA with her husband, daughters, and two rescue mutts. 3/30/15
Liz Solms lives between her hometown of Philadelphia and the island of Jamaica. Her writing has appeared in Post Road, Wasafiri, The Village Voice, War Literature & The Arts, and Diner Journal, among other publications. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, the Breakwater Prize in poetry, and a two time finalist for Glimmer Train’s New Writer Award. She holds a MFA from Bennington College. 3/25/13, 4/24/19
Sofi Stambo won the first prize in fiction in 2015 Dzanc Books/ Disquiet International literary contest. She won the second prize in 2016 No Tokens fiction contest and was a finalist in the American Short Fiction contest. Stambo was selected by Wigleaf for their 2016 best flash top list. She has a Master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University (Saint Kliment Ohridski) in Bulgaria and was a graduate student in Literature at City College New York. Stambo attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2016. One of her stories was nominated for the Pushcart prize 2018. 2/27/17
Julie Stern has had stories published in Room Magazine, The Owen Wister Review and read aloud in the Los AngelesNew Short Fiction Series. She works for the design company, BassamFellows, whose work is on the cover of July 2019 Wallpaper Magazine. She has lived in a lake house in Lugano, Switzerland, a dance hall in Topanga Canyon, California, and presently resides in a cottage in Bethel, Connecticut – hometown of P.T. Barnum. 10/27/14, 7/24/19
Kathleen Stone is a nonfiction writer. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, ArtsFuse, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Grist, The Writers’ Chronicle and The Timberline Review. Currently, she is at work on a group biography of mid-twentieth century women. She also co-hosts Booklab, a monthly literary salon in Boston. Founded in 2013, Booklab invites authors into a private living room to discuss fiction, nonfiction and poetry. You are welcome to join the salon. To find out more, contact Kathleen through her website, https://kathleencstone.com/. Kathleen holds graduate degrees from the Bennington Writing Seminars and Boston University School of Law. She has taught seminars on American law in six foreign countries, as a Fulbright Senior Specialist and through the Center for International Legal Studies. 9/25/19
Dalena Frost Storm is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, still trying to come to terms with being an alum. Her interests outside of writing include dance, veganism, sunlight & dance. The social causes she is committed to speaking and acting in support of include all forms of equality, particularly those of sexual orientation, race, and gender. She likes the magical real and the real magical. She would be super flattered if you wanted to check out one of her stories, like this one here: http://pankmagazine.com/piece/winters-kitchen/. 5/25/15
Born and raised in the Bronx, Joe Stracci currently lives in Connecticut, in a house described on the land survey as an “underground dwelling.” His first novel, Whitney, was the winner of the 2011 New Rivers Press MVP Competition and will be published on October 15th, 2013. Joe’s fiction has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Inkwell, PANK Magazine, Specter Magazine, and Word Riot. Joe teaches at Manhattanville College, blogs at joestracci.org, and reads for PANK Magazine. 5/27/13
Susan Swenson holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and an MA from the New School for Social Research Graduate Studies. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, The Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet Magazine, and elsewhere. Her artist interviews have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues. Swenson co-founded and served as editor of Pierogi Press. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where she is co-owner of Pierogi Gallery and The Boiler with her husband, Joe Amrhein. 4/27/15
T. Tallon teaches English to artsy high school students who draw him in his natural form: a cartoon. He once got blackballed from college radio for making an inappropriate joke about underage drinking. He has been laboring on a novel for six years. He assumes it will be another six years until he writes page two. He is grateful to V for giving him the chance to read to other people because he sometimes stays up late at night––with a martini––reading vindictively at the books on his shelves, much to his husband’s chagrin. 2/27/12, 11/27/19
Kelly Tanner is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction and Nonfiction at Bennington College. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature from NYU. She works in Manhattan in Human Resources. Her short stories and memoir have been published in the journals Pigeon Pages, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and Dovetail. Kelly lives in the Hudson Valley in New York with two puppies, a very tolerant cat, and a tortoise. 12/17/18
Hannah Tennant-Moore’s work can be found in Tin House, n+1, The New Republic, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, and other places. Her essay, “The Sexual Lives of Sri Lankans,” received an Honorable Mention in The Best American Travel Writing 2011. She is at work on a novel based in Sri Lanka. 4/30/12
Brent Terry’s poems, stories, plays, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines. He is the author of the poetry collections yesnomaybe, Wicked, Excellently, and the recently released Troubadour Logic, as well as a forthcoming novel, The Body Electric. Among the honors he has garnered are a fellowship from the Connecticut Arts and Tourism Board and the 2017 Connecticut Poetry Prize, as well as nominations for ‘Best of the Net’ and Bettering American Poetry. Terry has worked with writers of all ages and abilities, and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Connecticut State University. He lives in and runs the trails around Willimantic, CT. 12/30/14, 5/22/19
Clifford Thompson’s new book, What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues, was named one of the ‘Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2019’ by Time magazine. His other books include the memoir, Twin of Blackness. In addition, his work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2018, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Threepenny Review, among other publications. 3/27/17, 1/22/20
Joseph Tobias is a Bennington Writing Seminars first-termer and second-year medical student at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was born and raised in Toronto as the lucky twin brother to his sister Claire. 8/25/14
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the memoir 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, and Another Insane Devotion, a book about the search for a missing cat that’s also an encoded exploration of love and marriage (it’s now out in paperback from Da Capo Press). His essays, journalism, and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Whiting fellowships and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Trachtenberg teaches in the Writing Program of the University of Pittsburgh and currently is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars. 10/28/13
Erin Trahan was born in the same town as Madonna and grew up in the Cherry Capital of the World. Her poems have appeared in Redivider, nth position, Coe Review, Word Riot, and elsewhere and she reads poetry submissions for AGNImagazine. By day she’s a writer and editor specializing in film and travel, which lately means writing about movies for WBUR (Boston’s NPR News Station) and wrapping up her fourth Frommer’s Guide to Montreal and Quebec City. She earned an MFA in poetry from Bennington College in 2010. 11/25/13
After ten years as a filmmaker, Randi Triant earned her MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and magazines. ‘The Pecking Order’ was selected for an anthology of the best writing about HIV/AIDS in the magazine Art & Understanding, published by Black Lawrence Press, and another story, ‘The Memorial’, was selected for the anthology Fingernails Across the Blackboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. Randi has taught writing at Emerson College and Boston College, and lives in Provincetown. The Treehouse is her first novel. 6/25/18
Anamyn Turowski is co-director of the Hudson Valley branch of Philip Schultz’s The Writers Studio and a very recent (!) graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Publishing credits include New Ohio Review (Pushcart nomination), Epiphany, 34thParallel, and the Times Union. 7/24/19
Karen Uhlmann, formerly a magazine writer covering topics such as the best beauty products for your wedding day, how not to lose your mind while remodeling your kitchen, and the top five potato salads, is now hard at work on a short story collection. Some of these stories have appeared in the Southern Indiana Review, Enizagam, Specter Magazine,and Fiction Southeast. Her short story, ‘Amalfi’, won the 2012 Northern Colorado Writers award judged by Antonya Nelson and appeared in its anthology. Uhlmann received her MFA in fiction writing and literature from Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2010. She is very happy to be reading here tonight. 1/27/14, 8/28/19
William T. Vandegrift, Jr. received his MFA in 2003 from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in multiple publications such as: Agni, Quarterly West, Kelsey Review, Eyes of Desire, Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Chronicle. He has been awarded residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Casa Libre en la Solana, and twice at the David and Julia White Colony in Costa Rica. An author, interviewer, and former restaurant reviewer, he is now focused on completing his novel and a memoir. He resides outside of Princeton, New Jersey with his partner, three cats, and two dogs. 5/25/15
Katherine Vaz is the author of two novels, Saudade, a Barnes and Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ selection, and Mariana, published in six languages and picked by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998. Her collections, Fado & Other Stories, won a Drue Heinz Literature Prize and Our Lady of the Artichokes won a Prairie Schooner Award. Her children’s stories have appeared in anthologies by Viking, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster, and her short fiction has appeared in many magazines. She’s the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded by the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division). Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a citation as a Portuguese-American Woman of the Year, and an appointment to the six-person Presidential Delegation (Clinton) to the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon. Vaz lives in New York City. 2/29/16
Sasha Wade is a mother and poet; her two grown children live in Houston, Texas. In 2016, she attended The Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and now currently studies at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s an emerging writer whose work has been published in The James Dickey Review. Sasha lives in New York City and Long Island with her husband. 4/24/19
Casey Walker is the author of the novel Last Days in Shanghai. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. 2/27/17
Sarai Walker graduated from Bennington in June 2003. As a magazine writer, her articles appeared in national publications, including Seventeen and Mademoiselle. She subsequently served as an editor and writer for Our Bodies, Ourselves before moving to London to complete a PhD. Dietland, her first novel, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May. 7/27/15
Mark Wallace’s journalism and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Philadelphia Independent, among others. He lives with his wife and their many children in San Francisco, where he will soon be launching a West Coast outpost of this reading series, so please look him up if you’re out there. 7/24/19
Barrett Warner is the author of the chapbooks My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014) and Til I’m Blue in the Face (Tropos Press, 1994). This year, he won the Salamander Fiction Prize and the Cloudbank Poetry Prize. New work is forthcoming in Tishman Review, Chiron Review, L.A. Cultural Weekly, Poetry Fix, Consequence, and Four Chambers. His essays regularly appear at Revolution John and Entropy Magazine. Warner is an editor at Free State Review and a literary journalist for Coal Hill Review and Blood Lotus. In January, he will release ‘Greasy Piano’, a collection of spoken Beatles, Natalie Merchant, and Stevie Nicks covers, recorded with his wife, Julia Wendell. 6/25/12, 12/30/14
Susan Jay Watson continues to receive encouraging rejections regarding how seriously her fiction has been read. Two chapters from her novel in stories have been published and, at present, she is working on her fourth draft while not yet abandoning all hope due to people like V and her editor Alexandra Shelley and the Jane Street writers’ workshops and all who come to support these readings. 8/27/12, 11/27/15, 11/27/19
Naomi Wax is the coauthor of What We Keep: 150 People Share the One Object that Brings Them Joy, Magic, and Meaning (Running Press, 2018). Her essays, reviews, journalism, and cultural critiques have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Iowa Review, Condé Nast Traveler, and other publications. She regularly writes about medicine, health, and social justice for the Ford Foundation and other global nonprofits. An occasional ghostwriter, she is also the author/coauthor of several books for children and young adults. She has an MA in literature from the Bread Loaf School of English and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bennington. Someday, she hopes to revive her beloved blog, Pill Girl Report, which she let lapse some years ago. 10/24/16, 9/24/18
Catherine Weber is an award-winning poet, storyteller, and artist working with encaustic, photography, paper, and textiles. She regularly performs both poems and short stories at a Moth-style story slam called ‘Wake Up and Smell the Poetry’ in Hopkinton, Mass. She is the project director of Art on the Trails (artonthetrails.com) which combines a juried art exhibition with ekphrastic poetry on the trails of a nature preserve in Southborough, Mass. Weber holds a BA in Communications from Emerson College and an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. 6/26/17
Daniel Webster Jr. is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Local Magazine, a print publication that showcases one town in America per issue. Currently, he is freelance proposal writing for NASA-based projects, while editing and writing a collection of essays about western Pennsylvania, ones that he hopes to print in something that he didn’t publish. He is sorry if you missed the featured readers from August and September (E. Ethelbert Miller & Rachel Pastan), who are overwhelmingly more professional and productive in their literary lives. Webster earned his MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January ‘12. 10/27/14
Tim Weed is the winner of a Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Award and a Solas Best Travel Writing Award. His first novel, Will Poole’s Island, was named one of Bank Street College of Education’s Best Books of the Year. His short fiction collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, was a finalist in the Short Story category of the 2017 International Book Awards and has been shortlisted for the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, and the Lewis-Clark Press Discovery Award. Tim teaches a popular novel revision series at Grub Street in Boston, is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, and occasionally works as a featured expert for National Geographic in Cuba, Spain, and Patagonia. Read more at www.timweed.net. 8/22/16, 8/28/17, 8/27/18
John West builds things with words, code, and music. He is the lead technologist at the Wall Street Journal, where he uses computers to find and report stories. He is also the co-founder and technical director of Et Cetera Gallery, a hub for online and IRL narrative experiments, which include Kiss List, a history of an artist’s first kiss with everyone she ever kissed, and King of That Also, a multimedia, operatic experience about partnership and marriage. West is a graduate of both Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he studied philosophy and historical performance, and he recently received his MFA in nonfiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. 12/18/17, 1/23/19, 9/25/19
Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, published by Red Hen Press in 2015 and winner of the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize, and Bathsheba Transatlantic (2010), which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. A PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Sarah, when she can, teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome, Italy. Not surprisingly, she spends a lot of time on planes. You can read samples of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com. 6/25/12, 10/26/15, 7/23/18, 8/14/19
Lily White has spent most of her adult life composing music and playing jazz saxophone, performing in clubs and jazz festivals around the world. In 2013, she earned an MFA from Bennington College. Since then, her writing has appeared in Brevity, Caffeine Press, The Bennington Review, The Southampton Review, and The New York Times. White’s website is http://www.lilywhitewords.com 4/30/12, 1/26/15, 3/27/17
Mary Beth “Betsy” Witherup reported on conditions in cities and countries around the world for more than 30 years before turning her pen toward her own experience traveling, working, and living abroad. She is currently working on a book based on stories from her travels. She has authored three picture books for children: The Alligator on the Escalator, The Turtle and the Butterfly, and Song of the Shepherd Boy. She lives in New York City. 8/27/18
Katrina Woznicki has been a journalist for twenty years. Most recently, her reporting and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet, US News & World Report, The Week, AFAR, Guernica, and Catapult. 8/22/16
Poet Mark Wunderlich was appointed Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars in August 2017. His most recent volume, The Earth Avails, was published by Graywolf in 2014, receiving the 2015 Rilke Prize. Voluntary Servitude, his second book, came out in 2004 also through Graywolf. His first, The Anchorage, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999, earned the Lambda Literary Award. His poems, interviews, reviews, and translations have appeared widely. Wunderlich has taught at Stanford and Barnard and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Ohio University, San Francisco State University, and Sarah Lawrence. As an arts administrator, he has worked at the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Poets & Writers and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. He lives in the Hudson River Valley and has taught at Bennington College since 2004. 4/28/14, 4/23/18
Liz Ziemska spent several years as a book and film agent before receiving an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, in January 2008. Her work has been published in Tin House and Interfictions 2, longlisted in the Best American Non-Required Reading series, and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. A 2015 Sewanee Scholar, she lives in Los Angeles with her family. 9/27/15
Marilyn Zion, writing as Marilyn Martin, has appeared in Third Coast, Gulf Coast, Catamaran, Lake Effect and other journals. Two of her pieces were listed as Notable Essays in Best American Essays in 2016 and 2018. She is also the author of Helping Children with Nonverbal Learning Disabilities to Flourish. More about Marilyn at: http://www.marilynmartin.me/. 7/29/13, 9/24/18