Festival and Conference of Poetry: Faculty Information
Now entering in its twenty-ninth year, the Festival of Poetry is one of America’s longest-running and most admired gatherings of poets.
This is a daily immersion in listening, reflection, and conversation about the pleasures and challenges of poetic work.
The Fellows are in residence throughout the week, with a different Guest Faculty poet present each day for a morning lecture, afternoon workshop, and evening reading.
Participants rotate through workshops conducted by the Fellows and may express preferences for which Guest Faculty workshop they would like to attend.
There will be time during the week for the composition of new work, and indeed at two of their daily workshops participants are asked to present a completely new poem and a new revision.
2007 Guest Poets for the Festival
Martha Collins is the author of a new, book-length poem, Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), as well as four other books of poetry: Some Things Words Can Do (1998); A History of a Small Life on a Windy Planet (1993); The Arrangement of Space (winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition, 1991); and The Catastrophe of Rainbows (1985). She has also published a chapbook, Gone So Far (2005); co-translated two collections poems from the Vietnamese, The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1997) and Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da (2005); and edited a volume of essays on Louise Bogan (1984).
Martha Collins was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1940. She earned a B.A. at Stanford University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bunting Institute, as well as three Pushcart prizes and a Witter Bynner Grant for translation and a Lannan Foundation Residency Grant. She founded the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, and she currently holds the Pauline Delaney Chair in Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Martín Espada is the author of a dozen books in all as a poet, essayist, editor and translator. His eighth and newest collection of poems is The Republic of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2006). His previous book, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2002 (Norton, 2003), received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen; City of Coughing and Dead Radiators; and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands. He has also authored a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry on CD, called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His honors include the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and two NEA Fellowships. In 2006 he was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship. Martín was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. Much of his poetry arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. He is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.
Edward Hirsch has published six books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981); Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Night Parade (1989); Earthly Measures (1994); On Love (1998); and Lay Back the Darkness (2003). He has also written four prose books: the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), Responsive Reading (1999), The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002), and Poet’s Choice (2006). He is the editor of Transforming Vision: Writers on Art (1994) and Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005). He is the co-editor of A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (2004). He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He taught for eighteen years at the University of Houston, and is now the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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Photo by Lisa Pines
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Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of six collections of poetry: Shadow of Heaven (W.W. Norton, 2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Kyrie (1995), a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Two Trees (1992); The Lotus Flowers (1987); The Forces of Plenty (1983); and Claiming Kin (1976). She has also written a collection of essays on craft, The Flexible Lyric (2001). Her new book, Messenger: Selected and New Poems, will be published by Norton in January, 2007. Ellen has been awarded the 67th Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her other honors include grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize. In 2003, she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In 1976, Ellen developed and directed the nation’s first low-residency writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont — a design for graduate study that has since been emulated by many other colleges and universities. Since 1981 she has taught in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Cabot, Vermont.
Fellows
Kazim Ali’s first book of poems is The Far Mosque (Alice James, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rattapallax, Quarter After Eight, Cross-cultural Poetics, and Catamaran, and in the anthologies Writing the Lines of Our Hands and Risen From the East. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, he is also the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage (BlazeVox Books). He is co-founder and publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University.
Ellen Dudley is the author of Slow Burn ( Provincetown Arts Press, 1997). Her new book, The Geographic Cure, will be published in early 2007 by Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Agni, Massachusetts Review, The Poetry Miscellany, Phoebe and other magazines. She is winner of a Vermont Council on the Arts Fellowship and is founding editor/publisher of The Marlboro Review. She was born in Harvard, Massachusetts and now lives in Marlboro, Vermont where she is co-owner of a construction company.
Fred Marchant is the author of three books of poetry: Tipping Point (winner of the Washington Prize, The Word Works, 1993); Full Moon Boat (Graywolf Press, 2000); and House on Water, House in Air: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press of Dublin, Ireland, 2002). He is also the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard, a collection of poetry by the contemporary Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. A former professor at Harvard and Boston University, Fred now teaches at Suffolk University in Boston, where he is chair of the Humanities and Modern Languages Department and director of the Creative Writing Program. He is also a longtime teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at U-Mass Boston, and he teaches in the Joiner Center’s annual writers’conference. He has been a member of the Executive Board of PEN New England, chair of PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee and founder of PEN New England’s writing workshop at Northampton County House of Correction. Fred is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago, and as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, he was one of the first conscientious objectors of an officer’s rank to be honorably discharged from the military.
Barbara Ras is the author of Bite Every Sorrow (Louisiana State University, 1998), which was selected by C.K. Williams for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award and also won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 1999, she was nominated for the Southeastern Booksellers Association annual award in poetry and was named Georgia Poet of the Year. She has received the Asher Montandon Award and honors from the National Writers Union, Villa Montalvo, San Jose Poetry Center, The Loft, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has traveled extensively in Latin America and lived for periods of time in Colombia and Costa Rica, and in 1994 she edited a collection of Costa Rican fiction in translation entitled Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press). Her second collection One Hidden Stuff is new from Penguin. An award-winning editor who has worked at North Point Press, Sierra Club Books, and the University of Georgia Press, Ras lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she directs the Trinity University Press.
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