Visiting Writers/Faculty

Jo Ann Beard is the author of The Boys of my Youth, a collection of autobiographical essays, and In Zanesville, a novel.  Her work has appeared in various magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, and has been awarded prizes from the Whiting Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She lives in upstate New York and teaches nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two books of poetry: Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).  He has published his poems in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, The Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Between Water & Song, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of the 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award and a Whiting Writers Award. Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan).

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (Norton, 2010); Hoops ( Norton, 2006); and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He is the editor of Countee Cullen: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013).  He has published poems and essays in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, and other fine literary publications. Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Major Jackson is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. As distinguished visiting writer, he has taught at Adelphi University, Columbia University, Xavier University of Louisiana, New York University, University of Massachusetts - Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence and Baruch College as the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Walter Kirn is the author of seven books, including the memoir Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever and the novels Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, which were both made into films. Kirn has reviewed books for New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine. He is a national correspondent for the BBC. Kirn lives in Livingston, Montana.

Jess Walter is the author of eight books, including Beautiful Ruins (2012), a New York Times #1 bestseller; The Zero (2006), finalist for the National Book Award; and Citizan Vince (2005), winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award. His work has been translated into 25 languages and his essays, short fiction, criticism and journalism have been widely published, in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's, Esquire and many others. Walter's first collection of short stories, We Live in Water: Stories (2013) was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Story Prize.

Photo Credits: Jo Ann Beard (Jennifer May Lores), Major Jackson (Erin Patrice O'Brien) and Jess Walter (Hannah Assouline)

Past Visiting Writers, 2012 - 2013:

Susan Cheever, Bill Kittredge, Victor LaValle, Alice Notley, Elizabeth Robinson, Robert Seidman, Ed Skoog