2017 Featured Writers

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

masha-gessenMASHA GESSEN is a journalist and the author of ten books. Her most most recent book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, is a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She’s also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She has received numerous awards, including a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, the 2017 Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, a Carnegie Millennial Fellowship and a Nieman Fellowship. he serves as vice-president of PEN America. Gessen was born in Moscow and immigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1981, at the age of 14. She returned to Moscow as a correspondent ten years later and stayed, becoming a Russian-language journalist in addition to her work for American magazines. She lives in New York City.

FEATURED WRITERS AND WORKSHOP LEADERS

KENNY FRIES is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, recipient of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry, and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited the anthology Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for “The Memory Stone,” which premiered at Asia Society Texas Center. His books of poems include Anesthesia and Desert Walking. He was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts; a Fulbright Scholar to Japan; and has received grants from DAAD (German Academic Exchange), the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in the spring 2017.  Both In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital innovative literature grant, and In the Gardens of Japan, a poem sequence, will be published in fall 2017.

MajorJackson_about1MAJOR JACKSON is the author of four collections of poetry, including Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award and was hailed in the New York Times Book Review as “a remixed odyssey.” His other volumes include Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops (Norton: 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Jackson has published poems, essays, and book reviews in American Poetry ReviewCallalooThe New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, New York Times Book Review, and in several volumes of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other honors.  Jackson has taught as visiting faculty at Adelphia University, New York University, Columbia University, University of Massachusetts-Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence and the Sidney Harman Writer in-Residence at Baruch College. He is the Richard A. Dennis Green & Gold Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

 

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