MFA PROGRAM IN POETRY

Current Faculty 2008-2009

 Jeff Friedman is the author of four collections of poetry: Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986). His poems and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, 5 AM, New England Review and The New Republic.
 
 
Carol Frost’s poems have appeared in four Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she was the poetry editor for Pushcart XXVIII. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two fellowships, and her writing has been honored by PEN, the Elliston and the Poets’ Prize committees, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her books include Love and Scorn, New and Selected Poems, Venus and Don Juan, Pure, I Will Say Beauty, and The Queen’s Desertion, all published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Her essays and poems appear in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and the New York Times. She founded and directs the Catskill Poetry Workshop at Hartwick College, where she was Professor of English and writer-in-residence. She has also taught at Syracuse University, for the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Wichita State University (as Distinguished Poet, in the spring of 1998), Washington University, where she was visiting writer fall, 1998, the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Five Islands Press Workshop at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and numerous other workshops and universities. She divides her time between Cedar Key, Florida, and upstate New York. She currently holds the Alfond Chair in Creative Writing at Rollins College.



Judith Hall is the author of The Promised Folly (Triquarterly Books, 2003), To the Mouth To, which was selected for the National Poetry Series, Anatomy, Errata, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry and Three Trios (Northwestern University Press 2006). She has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundations. She serves as the poetry editor of the Antioch Review and teaches at the California Institute of Technology.
 

Brian Henry is the author of five books of poetry—Astronaut (published in the U.S. and England, where it was short-listed for the Forward Prize, and also published in Slovenia in translation), American Incident, Graft (published in the U.S. and England), Quarantine (winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America), and The Stripping Point—and the chapbooks In the Unlikely Event of a Water and Hit and Run. His sixth book, Lessness, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines around the world, including The New Republic, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Grand Street, Poetry Review, and Jacket. His poetry has been collected in many anthologies and has been translated into Russian, Slovenian, and Croatian. He has co-edited Verse since 1995, and he co-edited The Verse Book of Interviews. His poetry criticism has appeared in numerous publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Jacket, Boston Review, The Yale Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His translation of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008; he is currently translating Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of

Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine.

  In addition, Ilya writes poetry in Russian. His work in that language was chosen for "Bunker Poetico" at Venice Biennial Festival in Italy. In late 1990s, he co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization which sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad with a goal of supporting such relief organizations as Doctors Without Borders and Survivors International.

  Ilya has served as a Writer In Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and has taught poetry at numerous literary centers. In Fall 2006, he began teaching in the graduate writing program at San Diego State University. Ilya has also worked as a Law Clerk at the National Immigration Law Center, and more recently at Bay Area Legal Aid, helping impoverished and homeless in solving their legal difficulties. He currently lives in Berkeley, Califonia with his wife, Katie Farris.

 
 
Paula McLain has been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of a 2001 fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of Stumble, Gorgeous (New Issues Press, 2006) and Less of Her  which received a grant from the Greenwall Fund of the Academy of American Poets. Her memoir, Like Family, was published in 2003 by Little, Brown and Co. Her work has appeared in various journals, including the Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West and The Bellingham Review. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
 
 

Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm in 1965 and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of two books of poetry: Ocean Avenue which won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize in 1998 and Astoria published by Pittsburgh Press in 2006. She has translated poems by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, a selection of which appeared in the collection For the Living and the Dead, published by Ecco Press. Her poems have also appeared in numerous publications and anthologies including The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Washington Post Book World, Double Take/Points of Entry and Five Points. She was awarded The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award in 1999 and in 2004 the Lotos Club Foundation Prize. In 2007 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Currently she is a Research Associate for 2007-2008 at the School For Advanced Research, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch and Cocktails. The latter was a finalist for the Lambda and the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards. Powell’s honors have included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the James Michener Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America and an Academy of American Poets Prize. In a review of Cocktails, the New York Times said of Powell “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.”  Powell’s most recent book is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). Additionally, a volume of selected poems is being published in Germany through Lux Books.

D. A. Powell’s work appears in numerous anthologies, including Norton’s Hybrid Forms, Legitimate Dangers: Poets of the New Century and Best American Poetry 1998 . His recent poems appear in Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, Poetry, New England Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell now teaches full-time in the English Department at University of San Francisco.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books, including The California Poem and The Book of Jon. Du Soleil, de l’histoire, de la vision, a selected poems translated into French, appeared in fall 2007.  Forthcoming are Body Clock and her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light.  [Her poems have been translated into nine languages, and she herself has translated poems from the Greek and the French, as well as, in collaboration with scholars or native-language poets, the Chinese and the Russian.]  Among the awards she has received for her poetry, nonfiction and translations are a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Writing Fellowship, The National Poetry Series, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing.  Sikelianos received her MFA in 1991 from Naropa, where she studied with many of the most exuberant poets of our times.  At present, she teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver.  She shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.

Judith Vollmer's most recent book of poetry, Reactor, was published in 2004 by the University of Wisconsin Press, was featured in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her other books include The Door Open to the Fire, awarded the Cleveland State Poetry Prize in 1997 and finalist honors for the Paterson Prize in 1999; Black Butterfly (limited edition, awarded the Center for Book Arts chapbook prize in 1997); and Level Green, the Brittingham Prize winner published by Wisconsin in 1990.  Vollmer has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her essay on Baudelaire, “The Stroll and Preparation for Departure” appears in the Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge University Press 2006). Vollmer also co-edits the national poetry magazine 5 AM.

ANNE WALDMAN, poet, editor, performer, professor, curator, cultural activist carries in her genetics the lineages of the New American Poetry, and is a considered an inheritor of the Beat (Allen Ginsberg called her his "spiritual wife") and New York School (Frank O'Hara told her to "work for inspiration, not money") mantles. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley prize for poetry, and recently had residences at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, and at the Christian Woman's University in Tokyo. Directing the Poetry Project at St Mark's Poetry Project over a decade, she co-founded the Jack Keroauc School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in 1974. She currently is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Naropa's celebrated Summer Writing Program and is working with the Study Abroad on the Bowery project in Manhattan's Lower East Side. She teaches each Spring in the New England College low-residency MFA Program in Poetry. Author and editor of over 40 books and small press editons of poetry, she has been working for over 25 years on the epic IOVIS project (two volumes published by Coffee House Press, 1993, 1997) and has published most recently MARRIAGE: A Sentence, Coffee House Press 2000, IN THE ROOM OF NEVER GRIEVE: New & Selected Poems with CD collaboration with Ambrose Bye, Coffee House Press 2003, Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow, with photographs by Patti Smith, Heavenbone Press 2003, and STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD COMPARED TO A BUBBLE, a long Buddhist poem, Penguin Poets 2004. She also co-edited the major anthology CIVIL DISOBEDIENCES: Poetics & Politics in Action, Coffee House Press 2004 with talks and essays by Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Michael Ondaatje, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Sonia Sanchez and others. She has directed productions with the Gertrude Stein Players in Boulder, Colorado and has worked in collaboration with students, dancers, videographers, visual artists, musicians, composers for over 30 years. She has, in particular collaborated with artists Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray and Richard Tuttle and her husband, movie director and writer Ed Bowes. She has also helped developed poetry projects in Vienna and Prague. She is co-founder of the Poetry Is News collective which curates forums of political and poetical discussion. She is a noted performer of her own work, developing original modal structures and sprechstimme strategies. She makes her home in New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

Distinguished Poet in Residence

 Maxine Kumin's new poetry collection, Still to Mow, will be published in September 2007 by WW Norton. Author also of Jack and Other New Poems, The Long Marriage and a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery,  Kumin's awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. She and her husband live on a farm in New Hampshire.
 

Guest and Visiting Writers 2008/2009 TBA

Previous faculty mentors have included: Li Young Lee, Bruce Smith, Thomas Lux, Chard deNiord, Cecilia Wolloch, Jennifer Clarvoe, Anne Marie Macari, Gerald Stern, DA Powell, Jan Heller Levi, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Jane Mead, Ira Sadoff, F.D. Reeve,  Marilyn Nelson, Michael Waters, Joan Larkin, and Alicia Ostriker.

Visiting writers have included: Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Grace Paley, Kimiko Hahn, Fannie Howe, Stephen Sandy, Martin Espada, Forest Gander, Toi Derricote, Peter Everwine, Russel Edson, Ed Ochester,  and Gail Mazur among others.

Directors

Jacqueline Gens is the co-director and a founder of the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College with former program director, Chard deNiord. For many years she worked at the Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, CO, before she joined the staff of the late poet, Allen Ginsberg in NYC. She has worked as program director for numerous regional nonprofits, including, the Great River Arts Institute and the Shang Shung Institute of Tibetan Studies located in Conway, MA. She is currently working towards establishing the Brattleboro Center for Literary Arts and curates a reading series at the Hooker-Dunham Theater. Her chapbook, Primo Pensiero with a foreward by Anne Waldman is forthcoming from Shivastan Press in the Spring of 2008.

James Harms is the author of five books from Carnegie Mellon University Press, After West (2008), Freeways and Aqueducts (2004), Quarters (2001), The Joy Addict (1998) and Modern Ocean (1992). His poems, stories and essays have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Verse, The Antioch Review, West Branch and many other journals. For his poetry he has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and grants from the Pennsylvania and West Virginia Arts Commissions. He lives with his family in Morgantown, West Virginia, where he was the founding director of the MFA Program at West Virginia University. For the spring semester of 2008 he will be Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He lives with his family in Morgantown, WV, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and is Professor of English at West Virginia University.