MFA Program in Poetry 

Members of the MFA faculty are among the foremost poets and translators writing today. Each faculty member is also selected in recognition of his or her teaching mastery.  Due to our low faculty-student ratio, all students in the program will have an opportunity to work with most faculty during the residencies or as a mentor at some point during their course of study in the program. The list of faculty is subject to change without notice. The current 2011-12 faculty are:  Carol Frost, James Harms,*  Ilya Kaminsky, Brian Henry, Malena Morling, Paula McLain, Tara Rebele (New Media) and Eleni Sikelianos. Guest faculty for upcoming residencies are announced on the MFA program blog at Tygerburning Blog.

*Program Director

Current Faculty 2011-12

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.

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, California with his wife, Katie Farris. For more on Ilya, visit  http://www.centrum.org/writing/2008/08/the-sunlight-of.html

Paula McLain has published two collections of poetry (Less of HerStumble, Gorgeous, both from New Issues Poetry Press), as well as a memoir about growing up in foster care (Like Family: Growing Up In Other People’s Houses), and the novel, A Ticket to Ride, which was published by Ecco in 2008 and named a “top read” by the Today Show. A second novel, which fictionalizes Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage and upstart years in Paris will be published by Ballantine in 2011, as well as internationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ucross Foundation, McLain’s work has recently appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, and Real Simple. She teaches exclusively for New England College’s low-residency MFA program in poetry, where she has been on faculty since 2002.

and

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.

Tara Rebele is a poet and new media artist/writer. She has performed her text-based multimedia solo works to live, proximal audiences in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Milwaukee, Boston, Richmond, and Atlanta, among other places and exhibited her live interactive works worldwide. She has been an artist, board member and grant recipient for the Institute for Creative Exploration at the University of Georgia. She is a member of the Board of Directors at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA. Her first book, And I’m Not Jenny: Performance :: Writing, was published in 2005 by Slope Editions. Her poems have appeared in Volt, Salt, How2, Dusie and Sleeping Fish, among other places. She is the Web Producer for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She has recenty joined New England College’s MFA Poetry Program to teach its new concentration offering in New Media Poetics.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Body Clock and The California Poem, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon.  Her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light appeared in 2009.  She has been the happy recipient of a number of awards, from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Fellowships, The National Poetry Series, New York Foundation for the Arts, Princeton University’s Seeger Fellowship, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, among others.  She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, and performs a leading role in two films by Ed Bowes.  Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she has participated in a number of international poetry festivals, including the Centre National du Livre’s Belles Etrangères two-week reading tour of France, the Days of Poetry and Wine in Slovenia, the Barcelona Poetry Festival, and Metropole Bleu in Montreal.  At present, Sikelianos teaches in the Naropa Summer Writing Program and the New England College MFA Program in Poetry as well as the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver, which she also directs.  She shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace. 

Guest and Visiting Writers 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, Judith Vollmer, Judith Hall, F.D. Reeve,  Marilyn Nelson, Michael Waters, Joan Larkin, and, Jeff Friedman, Anne Waldman and Alicia Ostriker.

Visiting writers have included: Jack Gilbert, Maxine Kumin, 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

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.

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 from 1989-1994. 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. Her chapbook, Primo Pensiero with a foreward by Anne Waldman was published by Shivastan Press in the Spring of 2008. Recent poems have appeared in The Alembic, Henniker Review, Poetry International, Spiral Orb and Connotations Press An Online Artifact.  She is the editor-in-chief of Tygerburning Literary Journal.