BENNINGTON WRITERS / PROSPECT STREET – readers bios

Mary Abbruzzese is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Meat for Tea, Jackson Hole Daily News, The End of the World, and various other on- and off-line mediums. Her short story ‘Tea Leaves’ won the Warren Adler Short Story Contest sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. Contact: www.maryabbru.com.  7/24/17

Albert Abonado is the author of JAW (Sundress Publications 2020). He teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo. He has received fellowships from NYFA and the NEA. His poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and others. He lives in Rochester, NY with his wife. You can find him at albertabonado.com.  12/6/11, 7/23/18, 4/27/21

Jennifer Acker is founder and editor in chief of The Common, and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, a fiction honorée for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir, Fatigue, is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Slate, Guernica, The Yale Review, and Ploughshares, among other places. Acker earned an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband. Find her online at jenniferacker.com and on Twitter @jen_acker.  2/23/15

Brandon Adams is an emerging writer. He’s been published in Chaleur Magazine, Light and Dark Magazine, and Two Sisters Publishing (contest winner). He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is currently pursuing an MA in English and Comp Lit at Columbia University. Brandon was born in Texas and lives now in NYC, but as a freelance musician, his work takes him everywhere, from Ohio to Vietnam. Brandon has taught at American University, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Conservatory.  12/28/21

Michael Ahn’s fiction has been in The Quarterly and AQR. Michael works with public defenders and social justice organizations to use story to generate empathy and action. Find him at www.storysaveslives.com.  1/28/13, 12/17/18, 8/14/19

Sara Alaica is a nomad and a citizen of the world. She grew up in Canada and the Balkans and has lived throughout Asia and the Pacific Islands. She earned her BA in literature from Carleton University, her MA from the University of Toronto, and currently manages digital communications for Columbia University. Alaica blogs at alittleroad.com.   6/26/17

Lisa Alexander received both the Fugue 2013 Prose Award and the UCLA James Kirkwood Award for Fiction. Her work has, or is about to appear in Litro, Meridian, Fugue, Cimarron, The Common, and the anthology, Mourning Sickness. She received her MFA from Bennington College in June 2011 and lives in Los Angeles with her family and two of the biggest cats she could find.  1/27/14

Royal Alvis graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January of 2005. He teaches creative writing to seniors at JASA Club 76 and his stories have appeared in The Storyteller, The Rambler, The Newport Review, Succor, and Midnight Circus. He recently finished a novel from which he will now be reading.  6/25/18

Stephania Amfitheatrof  1/25/17

Benjamin Anastas is the author of two novels, An Underachiever’s Diary, and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, which was named among the year’s Notable Books by The New York Times. His novella, Versace Enthroned with Saints Margaret, Jerome, Alex, and the Angel Donatella, appeared in The Yale Review and received the magazine’s Smart Family Foundation Prize for fiction. His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications including Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Men’s Vogue, and GQ. Anastas is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars. His memoir, Too Good to Be True, will be published this fall.  9/30/12

Christine Anderes lives on a dune compressed between the ocean and bay. She’s a conservationist, animal activist, and volunteer firefighter (EMS.) She has three poems appearing next month in the international anthology, The Poetic Bond, vol. VII. Poems of hers have appeared annually in this anthology for the past five years. Anderes’ work has appeared in journals in France and the United States. Presently, she is at work on three collections of poetry: Bodies in Motion, Juggernaut and Deposed – attesting to the beauty and resilience of nature, as well as the critical state of our planet and its inhabitants. 4/29/13, 9/25/17

Joseph Ross Angelella is the author of the irreverent and twisted coming-of-age debut,  Zombie: A Novel (Soho Press, 2012). His award-winning short fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Sou’wester, Coachella Review, Southampton Review and elsewhere. His screenplay, Nemesis, won the award for Best Dark Comedy Short in the Houston Comedy Film Festival (Fall 2020). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. He teaches writing in both the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park and the Electronic Media & Film department at Towson University. Ross lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist and editor Kate Angelella, and their dinosaur-obsessed son Geno. Find him on twitter: @jrangelella. Visit his website: www.jrangelella.com. 8/27/12

Liz Arnold’s writing has appeared in The Common, Longreads, Ninth Letter, Catapult, The Paris Review Daily, and The New York Times, among others. She is the recipient of residences and scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Follow her on twitter.com/lizarnold and instagram.com/lizarnold.  2/17/14

Poet and writer Sally Ashton is Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She is the author of four books, including The Behaviour of Clocks, published in 2019. Ashton has taught writing at San Jose State University and in numerous workshops. Recent work appears in Writers Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, Cagibi, Rattle, Poetry Flash, and in the anthology A Cast-Iron Aeoroplane that Actually Flies: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poems. Look for more of Ashton’s work at www.sallyashton.com and www.dmqreview.com.  4/24/17, 5/22/19 

Robert Atwan is series editor for the highly acclaimed Best American Essays, which he launched in 1986. The editor of numerous literary anthologies, his essays, criticism, humor, poetry, book reviews and scholarly work have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Image, Denver Quarterly, River Teeth, and Kugelmass. He will read a portion of a forthcoming essay, “Montaigne and Me,” a meditation on sex, embarrassment, erotic poetry, and the maladies of old age.  4/2/14

Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo is a prize-winning poet, critic and performer.  She is the author of The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books). Recent work appears in AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books.  She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Bennington College.  A classically trained musician and an advocate of cross-genre work, she has performed sound/text collaborations with artists such as Salman Rushdie and members of The National, Bon Iver, and American String Quartet. She lives in New York City. Find her on Twitter: @jmaebarizo, or Instagram: @jmaebreeze. 12/6/11, 9/27/15

A.W. Barnes is the author of the new memoir, The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence, published by Bucknell University Press and distributed by Rutgers University Press. The book has been nominated for a Lambda Literary prize and a Publishing Triangle award. He received his MFA at Bennington in nonfiction in 2017. He is also the author Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England. He works at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  4/25/16, 2/27/19

Julie Batten is the founder of the Glass House Shelter Project, a grassroots organization that brings college reading & writing courses into homeless shelters. She teaches writing at both Salem State University and the University of Massachusetts / Boston and drives like a true Bostonian between the two.  11/27/17

Douglas Bauer’s forthcoming novel, The Beckoning World, will be published in the Fall, 2022. He is the author of three previous novels — Dexterity; The Very Air and The Book of Famous Iowans — and three works of non-fiction — Prairie City Iowa: Three Seasons at Home; The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, which won the PEN/New England Award in Non-Fiction. He is also the editor of the anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. His numerous essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Book Review, and many other publications. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative non-fiction. Bauer lives in Cambridge, Mass and teaches at Bennington College, where he is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program in writing and literature.  3/22/22

Christina Beasley is a writer, poetry editor for Barrelhouse, civil servant, and amateur cryptozoologist. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Hobart, Split Lip, Atlanta Review, The Pinch, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She is completing her MFA with the Bennington Writing Seminars in January and lives in Washington, D.C.  12/28/21

Paul Beckman is an award-winning author with a new flash collection, Kiss Kiss (Truth Serum Press). He had a story selected for the 2018 Norton Micro-fiction Anthology and another nominated for The Best Small Fictions 2019 BSF. He lives in Connecticut and runs the FBomb NY flash fiction reading series in KGB’s Red Room. Some of his publications are Spelk, Necessary Fiction, Litro, Pank, Playboy, Thrice Fiction, The Lost Balloon, and The Raleigh Review.  7/27/15, 1/23/19

April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Brawl & Jag, her fifth collection of poems, is just out from W.W. Norton. Miss Fuller, a novel, was published by Steerforth Press in 2012.  Her previous books of poems are Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye. Bernard, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and other journals, is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College, and also teaches in the Bennington MFA Writing Program.  4/25/16

Mirande Bissell is a teacher and poet who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her first collection of poetry, Stalin at the Opera, was selected by Diane Seuss as the 2020 winner of the Ghost Peach Press Prize.  4/26/22

Julie E. Bloemeke’s first full-length poetry collection, Slide to Unlock, debuted with Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2020. A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her poems have been widely anthologized, most recently in Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology and Pandemic, a UK-based poetry anthology. A finalist for the Telluride Institute’s 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Cortland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, and others. Her essays and interviews have been published in Writer’s Chronicle, Poetry International, and EcoTheo Review; she also recently co-edited the Dolly Parton tribute issue of Limp Wrist Magazine. In addition to teaching online poetry workshops, she is a freelance writer, editor, and guest lecturer. To learn more, please visit www.jebloemeke.com.  2/24/21

Charles Bock is the author of the novels, Alice & Oliver, and Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Charles is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and his daughter in New York City.  6/27/16

Gina Lujan Boubion writes about the Mexican-American experience. Stories and essays have appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News, 580 Split, Latina, Bride’s, and Reed Magazine.  Her story, “The American Dream is a Combination Lock,” which appeared in the summer 2012 issue of The Antioch Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a notable selection in the 2013 Best NonRequired Reading Anthology. A former newspaper reporter, she was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York. She holds graduate degrees from Northwestern University and Bennington College.  2/27/12

Rebecca Boucher is an attorney who practiced in Manhattan Family Court representing parents accused of abuse or neglect of their children. She is writing a book about the child welfare system.  2/27/19

Amy Bowers is a New Haven-based writer who until recently lived in steamy central Florida. Her work has been published in Mabel, Bella Grace, PANK, and the essay she is reading tonight will be anthologized in a forthcoming book. She writes about the natural world, family life, art, and popular history. Recent research has included Fanny Palmer, the prolific Currier and Ives artist, habitat dioramas, eggs, and domestic advice literature.  1/22/20

Patrick Boyle is editor-in-chief of Lamplighter, an alternative arts and music publication based in and focused on New Jersey. He is a 2014 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and his poetry has been published in Jelly Bucket, Four Chambers, and Cooper Street. Follow him on Twitter @Patboyle.  4/29/13, 4/27/15

Molly Guinn Bradley is in her second term at the Bennington Writing Seminars, pursuing a dual-genre degree in nonfiction and fiction. Her writing recently received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train and has previously been featured on The Toast and Splitsider, two online humor-writing publications that have since shut down. She’s fairly certain this is a coincidence, but if you’re growing weary of running your own humor site, please solicit her work. Find her on Twitter @mollyguinn.  10/22/18, 1/23/19, 8/14/19

Shevaun Brannigan’s work has appeared in such journals as Best New Poets, AGNI, and Slice, and is forthcoming in Bat City Review. She is a recipient of a Barbara J. Deming Fund grant and holds an MFA from Bennington College. She resides in Philadelphia and works as a fundraiser.  12/30/13

Elijah Burrell was raised in Missouri and has lived there for most of his life. Aldrich Press published his second poetry collection, TROUBLER, in 2018. His first collection, The Skin of the River (Aldrich Press), was published in 2014. Burrell received the 2010 Jane Kenyon Scholarship at Bennington College, where he earned his MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington’s Writing Seminars. His writing has appeared in publications such as AGNI, North American Review, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Sugar House Review, Measure, and many others. In 2012 Burrell joined the faculty of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. An Associate Professor in Lincoln’s Department of Humanities and Communications, he teaches creative writing. You can find him at – http://elijahburrell.com, on Twitter @eliburrell, and on Instagram @elijah__burrell.  4/27/15, 11/26/18

Rita Calderon’s work has appeared in several small publications. She has read her fiction and non-fiction at Cornelia Street Café, Above the Bridge Writers, Word-Up Bookstore and other venues. She earned her MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in New York City.  5/26/14  

Tess Callahan is the author of the novel, April & Oliver, from Grand Central Publishing. Her short work has appeared in AGNI, Narrative, The New York Times Magazine, NPR’s ‘Three Books’ Series’ and Writer’s Digest, among others. She is a TEDx presenter on creativity. During her MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars, she was fortunate to study with Amy Hempel, who taught her the wisdom of concision.  5/22/17, 8/28/19

Cecile Callan’s (MFA Bennington Writing Seminars January ’17) poetry and fiction have appeared in Louisiana Literature  http://www.louisianaliterature.org/louisiana-literature-35-2/, The Fish Anthology, and The End of the World. She is an award-winning playwright and has written for Brevity Blog. She is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine.  5/22/17

Diane Cameron is a writer, and writing teacher, and speaker. She was in the Class of 1999 at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her newspaper columns appear in The Albany Times Union and many papers and magazines. She is the author of three books, Looking for Signs, a collection of essays; Out of the Woods about women in recovery; and Never Leave Your Dead, a history of military trauma. Her essays on trauma have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find me on Facebook at Diane Cameron-Author. And on Instagram at DianeOKlotaCameron and Twitter at @DianeOCameron.  5/25/15, 2/27/19

Miriam Camitta, a Philadelphia-based writer, earned her MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2016. She is a life-long educator, currently in semi-retirement, writing and editing for Cleaver Magazine, as well as teaching literature and creative writing in Temple University’s non-credit division. Her documentary film, Crosstown, was nominated for Best Independent at the 2001 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema and aired on local public television. Miriam earned a doctorate in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for over 30 years, and last year won Head and the Hand’s annual spelling contest for Philly-area literary organizations.  12/17/18

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s first collection of stories, Contents Under Pressure, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her debut novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, received the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Known by Heart: Collected Stories was published in 2020. Her novel, Frieda’s Song, will be published in May 2021. Meanwhile, her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and been recognized by the Pushcart Press. Campbell is contributing editor for The Fiction Writers Review, and a columnist for The Washington Independent Review of Books. A graduate of The Bennington Writing Seminars and the Simmons School of Social Work, for many years she practiced psychotherapy. Campbell and her husband live in Washington D.C. and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania. She is at work on a new novel. Find her at www.ellencampbell.net and on Twitter @ellenpcampbell, as well as Instagram: EllenPrentissCampbell and Linked In: Ellen Prentiss Campbell.  11/27/15, 12/16/20  

Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut fiction collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, (Sarabande Books, February 2022) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Ploughshares Solos, Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood (Riverhead, 1996). Leslie earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco.  2/22/22

Matthew David Campbell is the author of a poetry collection entitled, Harmonious Anarchy, (Weasel Press 2016), and a chapbook, The House of Eros, (Red Ferret Press 2015). His poems have appeared in Tight, Spires, Forklift Ohio, and the anthologies, The Brink: Post Modern Poetry from 1965 to the Present, Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, and How Well You Walk Through Madness. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in New Jersey.  8/26/13, 9/25/17

Amber Caron’s work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review Online, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Fiction Editor at AGNI, and her first book, Lost Person Behavior, will be published by Milkweed in 2023.  11/23/21

Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus (The Word Works), one of Entropy Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2018. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, Narrative, The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Tin House, and elsewhere. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she won Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize. Her poetry videos and multimedia collaborations have been featured in Interim, Narrative, TriQuarterly, Writers Resist, and other venues. She lives in New York City. Her work can be found at willacarroll.com. Follow her on Twitter @willarcarroll.  12/6/11, 6/30/14, 11/26/18

Monica Carter is a writer, poet, and reviewer. She was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, a Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT Emerging Voices Fellow, and a fiction graduate of the prestigious PEN Center’s MARK program. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals including The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, Cactus Heart, Bloom and the anthology Strange Cargo. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today and Foreword Reviews. She is finishing her first novel.  5/28/18, 8/14/19

Marcelo Castro was born and raised in Mexico City. He went to college in Mexico. He received a diploma in Spanish and Latin American literature and attended drama school in Spain. In 1994, Marcelo moved to New York. In 2018, he graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He has finished his first novel and looks forward to publishing it soon. Marcelo lives in Connecticut.  12/17/18

Andrea Caswell’s writing has been published widely in print and online. Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Columbia Journal, and others. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s a fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine, where she’s on the faculty of the Cleaver Workshops. In 2019 her fiction was accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She can be reached at www.andreacaswell.com.  11/27/1

Rebecca Caum graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2013. Her memoir, Love Like Animals, is due to be finished this spring.  10/24/16

Rebecca Chace is the award-winning author of four books, Leaving Rock Harbor; Capture the Flag; Chautauqua Summer; and June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny. She has written for the New York Times, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, NPR’s All Things Considered and other publications. She teaches Creative Writing and is Director of the MA Program in Creative Writing and Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University. You can find more at www.rebeccachace.com and on Twitter: @RebeccaChace and instagram: RChace1.  3/25/13, 3/28/16, 2/26/20

Elaine Fletcher Chapman is the author of two volumes of poetry, Reservoir (June 2021) and Hunger for Salt (2017), both published by Saint Julian Press and a letterpress chapbook, Double Solitude, at Green River Press. She teaches literature at Old Dominion University. Elaine served on the staff of The Bennington Writing Seminars for 18 years and founded The Writer’s Studio where she teaches poetry, nonfiction and an ongoing class, ‘On Keeping a Journal.’ She also teaches a series: Yoga Nidra & Sacred Writing. She works as a therapist in private practice, as well as a certified iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation teacher. Her poetry has appeared in Amethyst Review, Cloudbank, Hoot, Poetry Pacific, 8poems journal, The EcoTheo Review, The Cortland Review, Connotation, The Sun, Calyx, Poet Lore, 5AM, Salamander, and others. Elaine lives on the west side of the Chesapeake Bay near the James River in Newport News, Virginia.  9/25/17, 4/24/19

Alexander Chee is a fiction writer, poet, journalist, and reviewer. Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best American Erotica 2007, A Fictional History of the US (With Huge Chunks Missing), Men on Men 2000, and His 3. His essay ‘I, Reader’ was selected for inclusion in the Notable Essays list of the 2011 edition of the Best American Essays. Compilations of his personal essays have appeared in From Boys To Men, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, The M Word, and The Man I Might Become and his poetry can be found in Barrow Street, LIT, Interview, the James White Review, and XXX Fruit. He was a judge for the PEN/Open Book award in 2012. He has taught fiction writing at the New School, Wesleyan, and Amherst and currently serves on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Chee’s second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish.  2/29/16

Susan Cheever’s books include My Name Is Bill – Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous; Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever; Note Found in a Bottle, a memoir of her own alcoholism and recovery; Treetops: A Memoir; and five novels: Looking for Work, A Handsome Man, The Cage, Doctors and Women, and Elizabeth Cole. Her essay ‘Baby Battle,’ in which she describes immersion in early motherhood and subsequent phases of letting go of her primary identity as a mother, was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars, edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner. Cheever is the author of American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, published in December 2006. In addition to working on her books, she teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program and at The New School. e. e. cummings: a life, her latest book, was published by Pantheon on February 11, 2014.  2/17/14

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We’re So Famous and Vernon Downs; editor of the anthologies Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine (with Mary Cotton), and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston. You can find him at www.jaimeclarke.com.  4/28/14, 7/25/16

Martha Cooley is the author of two novels – The Archivist, a national bestseller published in a dozen foreign markets, and Thirty-Three Swoons – and a memoir, Guesswork. Her third novel, Buy Me Love, will be published in June 2021. A Professor of English at Adelphi University, she has published short fiction, essays, and co-translations in numerous literary magazines. She can be found at  www.marthacooley.com, @signoramartha on Twitter, and also on FaceBook.  1/27/14

Carrie Cooperider is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published in the Antioch Review, NY Tyrant, Egress Magazine, 3:AM, and in Best Small Fictions 2017 and 2019, among other places. She lives on an island off the southern coast of Manhattan. On Twitter – @clcooperider. On Instagram @ccooperider.  10/23/17, 8/28/19, 11/23/21

Whit Coppedge’s fiction and other work have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, The Tusculum Review, and The Dos Passos Review, among other publications. He was awarded North Carolina State’s Brenda L. Smart Fiction Prize, part of a dominating stretch of three wins in five years for Bennington graduates, and was a founding member of the late Triangle-area writers’ center, The Hinge. He lives in Chapel Hill.  5/22/17

Chantal Corcoran is fascinated by the complex relationship between truth and fiction and is currently writing a novel exploring this. An essay she wrote on the subject appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Other nonfiction works, including book reviews, have been published by The Rumpus, The Common, NPR’s Desert Companion, Vegas Seven, and Las Vegas Review Journal. Her short stories have appeared in Grain, Litro Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Milo Review, Lost Magazine, and elsewhere. ‘I Swear I Will,’ a personal essay she published anonymously, won a 2017 MAGGIE Award. She is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.  9/27/15

Jackie Corley is the publisher of Word Riot, an online magazine and small press. Her fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Redivider and 3AM Magazine, among others, and in various print anthologies. Corley graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2011.  9/29/14

Ruth Crocker is thrilled to be reading tonight with the Bennington crew. Since (that sad day of) graduation in January 2011, Ruth has published two award-winning nonfiction books and several essays, one named a notable essay in Best American Essays and another receiving a Pushcart nomination. Presently, she is working on a collection of essays and – to her surprise – some historical fiction. She frequently speaks at Veterans Coffeehouses and workshops where she encourages the art of personal storytelling and, this summer, she will be teaching nonfiction writing at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Mass. She presented her memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War to President Obama at the White House in 2014. She lives and writes in Mystic, Connecticut. Website: /www.ruthwcrocker.com; FaceBook: Ruth Crocker; LinkedIn: ruthwcrocker; + Instagram: ruthwcrocker.  9/30/12, 5/19/14, 6/26/19

Kate Crosby’s stories have appeared in Pleiades, The Journal, The Bellingham Review, Bartleby Snopes, Beecher’s Magazine, and others. Her flash fiction received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize and Queens Ferry Best Small Fictions. She teaches high school English, coaches cross country, and comes up with most of her story ideas while running. She lives in Salem, Mass. She is thrilled to be reading tonight with her talented Bennington classmates and can’t wait to see them again in person.  12/28/21

Traci Evadne Currie is a Jamaican-American spoken word artist who hails from the East Coast. She taught Communication Studies in Flint, Michigan for fourteen years and worked with young women in juvenile detention employing mindful art practices. Her interests focus on trauma and healing, restorative justice, and art-centered practices.  8/27/18

Jessica Danger lives, writes, and teaches in Southern California with her family and dogs. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Her work has been included in several journals including Crux, Wild Quarterly, The Tishman Review, Gold Man Review, Thin Air Magazine, Mud City Journal, The Aerie, and Creative Guts. The former Managing Editor of Morning Chalk Up, Jessica’s work has appeared regularly in health and fitness periodicals. She is also the Director of Education at Dead Reckoning Collective and a resident faculty member at Concordia University, Irvine. She was recently shortlisted for the Iowa Review Nonfiction Prize judged by Eula Biss. Her partner is the poet and editor Keith Walter Dow.  11/23/21

David Daniel’s Seven-Star Bird, published by Graywolf Press, won the Larry Levis Prize for the best first or second book of its year. Writing about that book, Harold Bloom called Daniel “an authentic heir of Hart Crane”, and Tom Sleigh wrote, “Daniel is one of the purest and most powerful lyric poets of his generation.” Many of the poems from his new book, Ornaments, Pitt Poetry Series, Fall 2017, have been featured in The American Poetry Review, Connotation: An Online Artifact, and Memorius. Daniel was Poetry Editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade and is the founder and producer of WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together many of the most celebrated artists in the world, including Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, Jonathan Demme, Rosanne Cash, C.D. Wright, Talib Kweli, and John Doe, for unique performances and conversations. He teaches in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University and he served on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.  11/27/17

April Darcy’s fiction can be found in Shenandoah, where she was the recipient of the Shenandoah River Fiction Prize, and her nonfiction can be found in North American Review, where she was a finalist for the Torch Nonfiction Prize. She has been shortlisted for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and Family Matters competitions; the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize; the Iowa Review Nonfiction Prize, and the Sonora Review Nonfiction Prize. She was awarded a 2020 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Also, https://twitter.com/AprilDarcy  5/23/16, 1/23/19, 3/13/19

Jarita Davis is a poet and fiction writer with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. She was the writer-in-residence at the Nantucket Historical Association and has received fellowships from the Mellon Mayes program, Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Davis’ work has appeared in the Southwestern Review, Historic Nantucket, Cave Canem Anthologies, Crab Orchard Review, Plainsongs, Tuesday; An Art Project, Verdad Magazine, and Cape Cod Poetry Review. Her collection Return Flights is forthcoming from Tagus Press March 2016. She lives and writes in West Falmouth, Mass.  2/29/16

Kristy Davis swings both ways: fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Swink Magazine and TK Review, and she has contributed journalism to Newsday, Condé Nast Traveler, and O, the Oprah Magazine, where she is currently an associate editor. Recently she quit smoking and has been making to-do lists and circling very important items, which she then does not do. She did, however, finish her MFA in fiction writing and literature at Bennington College Writing Seminars this June.  8/27/12

Lauren Davis is the author of Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press) and When I Drowned (Aldrich Press, forthcoming), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press), and The Missing Ones (Winter Texts). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and she teaches at The Writers’ Workshoppe. Davis is the winner of the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest and the House Journal Fiction Contest.  4/26/22

Alex Dawson teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, Middlesex County College, and the Middlesex County Arts High School. He is the author of The Rapscallion Club, a forthcoming archeological adventure series for all ages, which has received advance praise from Lev Grossman of Time Magazine and World Fantasy Award winner John Crowley, among others. Until 2012, Dawson was the owner of The Raconteur, a bookshop and performance venue, hailed by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and The Newark Star Ledger. He founded Raconteur Ventures, a company dedicated to reviving and animating communities through cultural programming, and hosts Raconteurs & Roustabouts, a vaudevillian variety show that puts authors on stage alongside musicians and sideshow performers.  6/30/14, 8/14/19

Dylan Debelis is a founding editor of Pelorus Press, publisher, poet, and performer based out of New York City. His day job is as a hospital chaplain in an Intensive Care Burn Unit. Debelis has been published in a diversity of influential literary magazines and reviews including Prairie Schooner, [TAB] Literary Review, and [apt] Poetry Review. His first full-length book of poetry entitled The Garage? Just Torch It was a finalist in the Vine Leaves Press Annual Vignette Award. Follow him on Twitter: @dylanddebelis.  6/26/17

Matt Debenham is the author of The Book of Right and Wrong, winner of the 2009 Ohio State University Press Prize for Fiction. He also has a pair of independently published stories on Amazon.com: “The Advocate” (a finalist in Narrative‘s Fall Fiction contest) and “Challenger.” His work has appeared in such publications as Roanoke Review, Battered Suitcase, The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many others. He has received a Fiction Fellowship from the state of Connecticut, was a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, and is the host of the books podcast, ‘What Are You Reading?’ He blogs about writing at mattdebenham.com.  3/25/13, 5/23/16

Annie Decker’s essays and observational humor pieces have aired on NPR and local public radio, appeared in newspapers and magazines, and been anthologized in various collections of both nonfiction and verse. A late bloomer, she received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2011. She lives and writes in upstate New York.  She has an ailing husband, four grown sons, three grandsons and a granddaughter, all of whom she considers fair game.  3/25/13

Bibi Deitz is a writer, editor, and native New Yorker. Her work has been published in the Harvard Review, Storyscape, Paper Darts, Bookforum, Bomb, Vice, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has received support from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Bibi recently finished writing her first novel, Stand Clear the Closing Doors. More at bibideitz.com.  12/17/19

A.N. Devers is a writer, editor, and rare book dealer. Her work has been published at The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Longreads, Slate, Salon, and elsewhere. She owns The Second Shelf, a bookstore focused on rare books and modern first editions by women. Her first book, Train, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. She lives in London. 8/25/11, 8/24/21 

Russell Dillon is the author of Eternal Patrol and the chapbook Secret Damage (both from Forklift Books). Recently, he attended the Vermont Studio Center as a James Merrill Fellow, where he went slightly insane sitting in a small room trying to write more poems. Dillon is the editor of Big Bell, a sometimes-annual magazine of art and poetry and his work can be found in handfuls of other magazines and online caverns.  4/29/13, 4/25/16

Heather Dobbins is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of two poetry collections, In the Low Houses (2014) and River Mouth (2017), both from Kelsay Press. She graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2011. Her poems and poetry reviews have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fjords, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. For twenty years, she has worked as an educator (kindergarten through college) in Oakland, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and currently, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Please see heatherdobbins.net for more.  6/25/12, 6/30/14

Mary Donnelly, a 2003 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, is a Brooklyn-based poet, educator, and video producer. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hunger Mountain, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, and The Yale Review, and the chapbook Mad World Colored Oil (Dancing Girl Press). She teaches through Gotham Writers Workshop and in the low-residency MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts at Sierra Nevada College and is an editor for DMQ Review. https://www.tumblr.com/blog/marydonnellypoetry.  11/12/12, 9/26/16, 1/23/19, 5/22/19 

Hugo dos Santos is a Luso-American writer, editor, and translator. He is the author of Then, There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), a collection of Newark stories, and the translator of A Child in Ruins (Writ Large Press, 2016), the collected poems of José Luís Peixoto. Learn more about his work at hugodossantos.com.  2/27/17 

Maureen Duffy is a writer and lawyer new to the Chicago area. In the autumns of 2014, 2015 and 2018, she was awarded writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and for the 2019 Tucson Literary Festival. She looks forward to further explore writing residencies around the world, especially in places where Bennington friends live. Since graduating from Bennington in ’08, she has published and/or had performed stories, poems, and essays in various journals – in print, on-line and live.  She remains… optimistic…and can be found at: http://theyesticket.blogspot.com  9/30/13, 1/23/17 

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), the winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and coeditor (with poet, Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). His poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Verse. Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated with his family at the age of five. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Dumanis has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, and Nebraska Wesleyan University, and since 2007, had been professor of English at Cleveland State University, where he also served as Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, a literary press, and taught in the Northeast Ohio MFA Program. Dumanis joined the Bennington College faculty in fall 2012 and serves as Director of the reading series, Poetry at Bennington, https://www.bennington.edu/poetry-bennington, as well as editor of Bennington Review, www.benningtonreview.org.  8/26/13

Molia Dumbleton’s work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere, and been awarded prizes including the Columbia Journal Winter Fiction Award and Ireland’s Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize. She is a member of the curatorial board at Ragdale and an assistant fiction editor at Split Lip. She’s so happy to be here.  12/28/21

Katie Durant is a Massachusetts writer, the Editor-in-Chief of The Dead River Review, a freelance writer, and an English and Creative Writing professor. She holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from Bennington College. Katie has published work in The Citron Review, The James Franco Review, The Voices Project, The Dead River Review, and The Middlesex Review. Specializing in nonlinear memoir, Katie is working on a memoir exploring the depths of her family’s struggles with poverty and mental illness. Find her website and blog here: https://katiedurant.com/.  10/27/14

Ginger Eager’s 2020 debut novel, The Nature of Remains, won the 2018 AWP Prize for the Novel. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in various online and print journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, and West Branch. Ginger works as a book coach and an editor-for-hire, and she teaches writing in nonprofit settings. Born and raised in Georgia, Ginger now lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their cats. In her free time, she enjoys taking long urban hikes centered around Trees Atlanta’s map of the city’s champion trees.  1/27/21

Sally Eckhoff (BWS ’09) is a painter, animator, and horse rider who lives upstate in the Hudson Valley. Her first book, F*ck Art (Let’s Dance) is a memoir of ten years she spent painting in the East Village, from the Summer of Sam to the Tompkins Square Park riots. Tonight, she’s going to read from its upcoming sequel, How Horses Get Their Names. She’s also working on the pilot for a podcast, Beastly Lies, that combines art, adventure, and animals. More at seckhoff@mac.com.  2/25/13, 9/24/18, 1/23/19

Valerie Ellis’ fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Enclitic, The Falls, the Progressive, and In These Times, among others. Her plays have been produced and/or workshopped at Red Eye Collaboration, Naked Angels, the American Place Theater, and the American Repertory Theater for Advanced Theater Training. She graduated with an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January ’03.  1/27/14, 7/24/19

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College in January 2008 and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her new collection, Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic, is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is available from White Violet Press. She blogs at annamevans.com/wordpress.  4/29/13, 5/19/14, 4/23/18

Jonathan Everitt’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in BlazeVox, Scarlet Leaf Review, Small Orange, Impossible Archetype, Ghost City Press, The Bees Are Dead, The Empty Closet, Lake Affect, and the Moving Images poetry anthology, among others. His poem, ‘Calling Hours,’ was the basis for the 2015 short film, Say When. Jonathan has also led a workshop for LGBTQ poets at Rochester’s Out Alliance and co-founded the long-running monthly open mic, New Ground Poetry Night at Equal Grounds Coffeehouse in Rochester. He earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College.  1/25/22

Maia Evrona is a poet, memoirist, and translator of Yiddish poetry. Since earning her MFA from Bennington, she has received fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the NEA, and elsewhere. Her website: www.maiaevrona.com and follow her on Twitter @MaiaEvrona.  2/24/21

Teresa Fazio’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, and The Nation, as well as the anthologies Retire the Colors, The Road Ahead, and It’s My Country, Too. She earned an MFA in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2018. Her memoir Fidelis, published by Potomac Books, shows a young woman Marine officer’s coming of age through the lens of a deployment relationship, and details the uneasy balance women strike while trading femininity for power in an environment where vulnerability is not only taboo, but potentially lethal. Her website is www.teresafazio.com and she can be found on Twitter @DoctorFaz.  5/28/18, 11/18/20

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me and Girlhood. The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Foundation, and others; her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. For more about her – www.melissafebos.com.  10/22/18

Rachel Miranda Feingold (Fiction, ‘14) is an editor of translated Eastern European literature and foreign language learning materials, and she was the recipient of a 2017 Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book will be published in Spring of 2021 in a genre she did not foresee: The World at Our Table: A Narrative Cookbook of Euro-American Family Favorites, illustrated by her daughter, artist Serena Faye Feingold. She currently makes her home in Connecticut, near her family and a small cove of the Long Island Sound, where she continues her lifelong practices of cooking, baking, writing, and walking by the sea.  5/27/13

Adriana Rambay Fernández grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Dominican immigrants. She is a current Jack Jones Literary Arts Fellow and a recipient of the Bennington MFA Fiction Prize. Adriana is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a collection of poetry. She teaches yoga and meditation and lives in Virginia Beach.  8/28/19

Libby Flores is a 2008 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Gagosian Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Post Road, Mc Sweeney’s, Tin House /The Open Bar, The Guardian, Paper Darts, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the former Director of Literary Programs at PEN Center USA (now PEN America Los Angeles). She is the Associate Publisher at BOMB magazine. Libby holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. She serves on the board of the Housing Works Bookstore, the LitNet Steering Committee, and the Periplus Committee—where she is a mentor. She lives in Brooklyn but will always be a Texan. She is represented by Sarah Bowlin at Aevitas Creative Management.  7/24/19

Jody A. Forrester was born and raised in Los Angeles during the uneasy Fifties and tumultuous Sixties. She graduated from high school in 1969, when the Vietnam War was raging, with the country increasingly divided along racial and class lines. While a freshman at San Jose State, she joined a communist organization advocating armed overthrow of the United States government. In Guns Under the Bed: Memories of a Young Revolutionary, Jody reaches into her past to understand how she came to embrace such a violent culture. Jody’s essays and short stories have appeared in many places, including The Sonora Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and WriteRoom. She lives in Venice, California with her husband and an Australian Shepherd, Charley.  1/27/21

Kate Hanson Foster is the author of Mid Drift, a finalist for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Award. Her writing has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A recipient of the NEA Parent Fellowship through the Vermont Studio Center, she lives and writes in Groton, Massachusetts. Her new book of poems, Crow Funeral, will be released by EastOver Press in March 2022.  2/22/22

Georges Michelsen Foy’s latest nonfiction book, Run the Storm: A Savage Hurricane, a Brave Crew, and the Wreck of the SS El Faro, was published in May 2018 by Scribner. Of his thirteen novels, the latest entitled Mettle was published in 2010 by University Press of New England. Foy’s long-form nonfiction has appeared in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal and others, and his short fiction and essays in Ep;phany Journal, Washington Square Review, Monkey Bicycle, Apeiron, Notre Dame Review, American Literary Review etc. Foy was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and he lives in southeastern New England and Brooklyn and teaches writing at NYU. At various times, he has worked as a factory hand, agricultural laborer, commercial fisherman, watchkeeping officer on British tramp freighters, and as chief transporter of cream pastries in a cookie factory. Find him at www.georgefoy.com, and https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Run-the-Storm/George-Michelsen-Foy/9781501184901, and https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/George_Foy.  10/23/19

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, including Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021) and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon 2012), which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, and Ploughshares. She is co-founder and editor of the online journal Memorious. Find her at www.rebeccamorganfrank.com. Also, at Books and Sample Poems.  4/25/16

Christopher Frizzelle is an essayist, journalist, and teacher. From 2007 to 2016, he was editor-in-chief of The Stranger, where a piece he edited won a Pulitzer Prize. He is the curator of the Quarantine Book Club and the inventor and host of the Silent Reading Party, which the New York Times calls “mesmerizing.” He has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bennington Writing Seminars, and he lives in Seattle. Find him @thefrizzler on Twitter and Instagram.  4/23/18

Charlie Gadol is still a practicing pathologist working part time in the Hudson Valley. He directs a couple of long-distance trail races in the Catskills and still runs himself, but at a much slower pace now.  Charlie continues to write poetry and collect rejections from poetry journals. His work has been published in Stymie, Nerve Cowboy, and a few other journals.  12/30/13, 1/22/18

Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was listed as ‘Notable’ in Best American Essays 2017, and her essays, poems, and art have been published or are forthcoming in Redivider, Longreads, Hotel Amerika, Catapult, The Coachella Review, Reservoir, and PANK, among others. She runs The Dollhouse, a creepy and fascinating feminist visual art project. Megan is Associate Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute.  6/24/13, 12/28/15, 10/22/18

Sean Gandert is the author of the novels American Saint and Lost in Arcadia. He lives in Albuquerque with his wife and more cats than you’d guess.  2/24/21

Rebecca Gee writes poetry and fiction, and her poetry has been published in The Madison Review, The End of the World, and The Writers Studio @ 30, an anthology published by Epiphany Editions. She is the co-founder and director of Kids Write, a nonprofit branch of The Writers Studio, where she teaches creative writing to youth in Brooklyn. She has developed online workshops for high school students with dyslexia and an online workshop that trains parents, tutors, and teachers how to use creative writing to teach writing and reading skills to dyslexic students. Gee is also an artist whose work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Austin, and St. Petersburg, Russia. She is Director of Development at Hudson Hall at the historic Hudson Opera House, a multi-arts center in Hudson, New York. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2016.  12/30/14, 7/24/17

Tessa Gerling is the author of Restless Bones, a collection of short stories, and is at present working on a novel titled Waiting for Norma Jean. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her short fiction has appeared in the inboxes of numerous literary magazine editors, and several of her stories have been notables among a small but very devoted circle of readers. Originally from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, she currently divides her time between Cambridge, Mass; Ontario, Canada; and Paris, France.  9/25/19

Melissa Giannini is a writer and editor in New York and currently features director for ELLE magazine. Previously, she was editor-at-large for Damn Joan, editor-in-chief of NYLON magazine, associate editor of SPIN magazine, and the staff music writer of Detroit’s Metro Times. She earned an MFA in writing and literature (nonfiction) from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a journalism degree from Michigan State University. Her website: http://www.melissagiannini.com. And you can find her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melissagiannini and Twitter: https://twitter.com/melgiannini.  7/29/13

Richard Gotti has a story appearing in the Chautauqua Literary Journal. The Hudson Valley Writers Guild and Theater Voices selected one of his stories for a staged reading, and the Albany Civic Theater chose his one-act play for its 2012 Playwright’s Showcase.  He co-authored a nonfiction book, Overcoming Regret, published by Bantam. A psychotherapist, he teaches at SUNY Empire State College and lives with his painter wife in the Albany area. Gotti is a June 2007 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. 5/27/13

Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which is the Snyder prize-winning, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred and fifty journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.  4/26/22

Geoff Graser writes about social justice, mental well-being, and sports — sometimes all three at once. His work has found homes in Narratively, USA Today, Cleaver Magazine and FanSided among other publications. He co-founded the Flour City Reading Series in Rochester, NY, which brings together voices from all literary genres. He hopes for its resurrection in the near future, along with other events for writers, readers, and everyone in Rochester, his home base. You can also find him at geoffgraser.com.  10/26/21

Frances Greathead is in her first semester studying creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She just quit her career and moved in with her mother on the Upper East Side to pursue her lifelong dream of writing, so she really hopes it works out. By fluke, she once published a short story in The Massachusetts Review. Greathead spends her days tutoring, writing, and trying not to freak out about the fact that she’s thirty-one and has no idea what’s next.  10/24/16, 1/23/19

Jayson Greene is the author of Once More We Saw Stars, published in May 2019. He is contributing editor and former senior editor at Pitchfork. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, and GQ, among other publications.  2/27/19

Margo Greenfield (BWS ’09), a retired public interest lawyer, co-leads a writing program for ex-offenders and Impact100 Essex, a women’s collective funding high impact grants in local underserved communities. Her stories about identity, work, and family have appeared in a few small print and online publications.  7/25/16

Matthew Groner is in his final term at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he served as a Residential Teaching Fellow. He currently teaches with the Bennington College Prison Education Initiative. In several weeks, Matt will attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute on scholarship.  1/23/19, 6/26/19

Jayne Guertin is a Rhode Island-based writer and photographer. Her work is informed by art, nature, and the abundance of strange and mysterious moments. Her writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, PANK Magazine, and, along with her photos, in The Tishman Review, which recently nominated her for a Pushcart Prize, Yankee Magazine, where she is a contributing blogger, and local publications. Guertin’s photography has also appeared in Lamplighter Magazine, as well as on the cover of MOTIF: Seeking Its Own Level: an anthology of writings about water.  12/28/15

Camille Guthrie is the Director of Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Diamonds, which comes out from BOA Editions this September. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Republic, At Length, On the Seawall, and many other journals.  4/27/21

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, What Does Not Return. She has received a Nicholas Roerich First Book Award, a Governor’s Humanities Award, and a Montana Arts Council Innovation Award. Her work has been featured on The Slowdown, The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry and in the Elemental Dialogue series by UK filmmaker Anna Cady. A former Montana Poet Laureate, Haaland is a professor of creative writing and has recently been appointed interim dean of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Montana State University Billings.  4/27/21

Kelsea Habecker is the author of the poetry collections, Hollow Out, selected by US Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, for the Many Voices Award; The Walrus Wives, a chapbook; and North Wife, a new full-length collection forthcoming in 2022 from Salmon Poetry. She is also the co-author of the book How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal with Prompts. Her MFA in poetry is from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a teacher and coach and leads retreats and workshops for women. Please visit kelseahabecker.com for more information on upcoming offerings.  5/22/19

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Claire Messud writes, she is “a contemporary Orpheus.” Her recent books include Life in a Country Album, winner of the 2020 Palestine Book Award and finalist for the Foreword Book Award; the flash collection, The Republics, winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. She is Associate Professor of Practice in Literature & Creative Writing at New York University – AD and writes the columns ‘The City and the Writer’ for Words without Borders magazine and “Journeys” Publishers Weekly Arabic. You can find at www.nathaliehandal.com, as well as on Twitter and Instagram @nathaliephandal  10/23/19

V. Hansmann was raised by wealthy people in suburban New Jersey growing up to be neurotic, alcoholic, homosexual, and old. In June 2011, he completed a low-residency MFA in creative writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. His publishing credits consist of essays in The New York Times, BLOOM, Post Road, The Common online, Best Travel Writing, Vol. 10, and Flash Nonfiction Funny, where he nestled between covers with Sven Birkerts, and poetry in Structo, Subtropics, The Tishman Review, and others. In August 2011, V established a monthly reading series, Bennington Writers, at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. And as of January 2019, the series moved to the KGB bar on East Fourth Street.  And, after a COVID hiatus, the series streams via Facebook Live every 4^th Wednesday. Find him at vleecker.com and prospectstreet.com.  6/30/14, 1/26/15, 12/28/15, 8/22/16, 7/24/17, 11/26/18, 1/23/19, 7/24/19

Ryan Harbage is a literary agent and poet in Brooklyn. His website: fischerharbage.com and find him on Instagram: @ryanfischerharbage and Twitter: @fischerharbage. 11/27/19

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the true crime memoir, Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, (University of Iowa Press, April 2019) and the novels Float and Addled. Her short fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Boston Globe Magazine, Design New England, Orion, Solstice, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered.  11/28/16, 4/24/19

Ken Harvey is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Book of Casey Adair (University of Wisconsin Press), as well as two award-winning books: a collection of short stories, If You Were with Me Everything Would Be All Right, and a memoir, A Passionate Engagement. He’s been published in over twenty literary magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, Consequence, and The Buenos Aires Review. He’s read his work on National Public Radio in the United States and in Italy and has been granted writing residencies at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Millay Colony. A regular book reviewer for Lambda Literary, Ken holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. You can find Ken at kenharvey.net.  11/25/13, 12/17/19

Pete Hausler sez:

How I know V: The Bennington Writing Seminars – I’m a January 1997 graduate of the third BWS class. 

Lit chops: Founding and current nonfiction editor of Post Road, a bi-annual magazine created by a handful of BWS graduates, who launched the first issue in 2000; still going strong and now an integral and popular part of the Boston College undergrad writing program. 

Writing: Essays and sports writing in Salon.com, AGNI, The Wall Street Journal, Fourth Genre, and Fanzine. 

Lives: Long-time New Yorker, who has resided in three of the five boroughs, currently lives in the Queens Prefecture and Milanville, Penna. 

With: Wife Olesia and two intelligent & lovely teenage daughters. 

Used to live: Baltimore, Prague, London, Nantucket and various parts of New Jersey. 

3/25/13, 1/26/15, 12/18/17, 1/22/20

Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), was a Book Sense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, short-listed for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. In addition, the novel became a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Hay currently teaches and works part-time at the Center for Fiction, www.centerforfiction.org.  10/27/14

Laura Haynes is a 2012 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars in poetry, but she made a transgenre 3^rd semester switch to fiction. She lives in Santa Barbara. Recent work can be seen in the Crab Orchard Review. In 2014, Haynes was awarded the Prime Magazine Poetry Prize.  8/26/13, 11/27/15

Amy Hempel is the author of five story collections, most recently Sing to It, (Scribner). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Foundation fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, and many others. Her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best Nonrequired Reading, and The Pushcart Prize. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Bennington College and at Stony Brook.  8/28/19

Paul Hertneky has written stories, essays, and scripts for the Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, NBC News, The Comedy Channel, Gourmet, Eating Well, Traveler’s Tales, The Exquisite Corpse, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Adbusters, Utne Reader, and The Athens News. He was named one of Poets & Writers “5 over 50” top debut authors for his memoir, RUST BELT BOY: Stories of an American Childhood. He has received a Solas Award for travel writing and two James Beard Award nominations. A 2001 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University and lives in Hancock, New Hampshire. You can find him at www.paulhertneky.com.  5/22/17

Judith Hertog grew up in Amsterdam, studied in Israel, lived and traveled in Asia, and resides now in Vermont with her family. Judith is an essayist, journalist, teacher, and storyteller. In addition to being a writer and storyteller, Judith also loves photography. Her essays have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Longreads, The Southampton Review, Consequence Magazine, Tricycle, and many others. Her work was selected as a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2020. Judith holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Find her at www.judithhertog.com  or on Twitter: @JBHertog.  10/28/13, 3/13/19

Beatrice Hill’s fiction has appeared in the journal Phenomenal Literature. She is also, under the nom de guerre, Susan Christie, a singer who went from being a never-was to a has-been with a recent appearance in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.  8/22/16

Jeff Hill is a moderately reformed frat boy turned writer who left teaching after 10 years to split his time between Nebraska and New York and focus on his writing career. His work has appeared in dozens of publications and his mom has a binder full of copies for any doubters. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Comic Booked and is currently pitching the novels, Dead Facebook Friends and Dead Week, to agents in New York and Los Angeles. Jeff is a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a regular participant of the Sarah Lawrence College Summer Seminar for Writers, and a past faculty member of the Writer’s Hotel. He can be found on both Twitter and Patreon as jeffhillwriter.  6/25/18

John Hill is a Bennington MFA. His fiction has appeared in The Southampton Journal, The MacGuffin, Inertia, and Sexandmurder. His nonfiction has been seen in 34^thParallel. He is also a music producer, songwriter, film composer, and teacher. He lives in New Jersey and Cape Cod.  1/28/13, 8/22/16

Katherine Hill is the author of two novels, The Violet Hour (Scribner 2013) and A Short Move, (Ig Publishing 2020), which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. With Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, and Jill Richards, she co-authored The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press 2020). Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including AGNI, The Believer, Bookforum, The Common, The Guardian, n+1, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review Daily, Post Road, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Tin House. Katherine is an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. Born in Washington D.C., she now lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn. You can find her on Twitter @KHill0.  9/30/13, 1/27/21

Danuta Hinc’s essays and short fiction have appeared most recently in the Literary Hub, Washingtonian Magazine, Popula, The Brick House, Consequence Magazine, The Word Riot, among others. She holds an M.A. in Philology from Gdansk University in Poland. In 2014 she received the Barry Hannah Merit Scholarship in Fiction from Bennington College where in 2016 she earned her M.F.A. in fiction. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University of Maryland where she teaches writing. Her novel, To Kill the Other is the fictionalized life story of one of the 9/11 hijackers. Currently, Hinc is working on two novels: Angels in the Forest loosely based on the life of her grandfather during WWII and For the Wife Who Comes After Me which explores the current political climate in America through the mirror of a relationship of unprecedented difficulties. Hinc is also translating into Polish, Amy Hempel’s The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. More information can be found on her website: https://danutahinc.contently.com.  11/27/15, 12/16/20

Jen Hinst-White’s first novel, Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair, is the coming-of-age story of a young queer woman aspiring to become a tattoo artist in working-class Long Island of the 1980s, when the tattoo industry was mostly closed to women. It is forthcoming from Pamela Dorman Books (under the pen name June Gervais) in 2022. Since earning her MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2012, Jen’s essays and stories have appeared in Sojourners, The Common, The Missouri Review, The Southampton Review, Big Fiction, Image Journal, Consequence Magazine, Cordella, and elsewhere. Find her at junegervais.com and on Instagram at @june.gervais.writer.  1/28/13, 6/27/16, 1/23/19, 11//27/19

Jenn Hollmeyer writes and paints in the Chicago area. She won the 2019 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for her story collection, Orders of Protection (University of North Texas Press). Jenn’s stories and essays have appeared in AGNI online, Shenandoah, West Branch Wired, and many other journals. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Read more at jennhollmeyer.com. Twitter: @JennHollmeyer | Instagram: @jennhollmeyer | Facebook: /jenn.hollmeyer. 12/17/19

Craig Holt’s first novel, Hard Dog to Kill, won the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal in 2018. His flash fiction has appeared in Psychopomp Magazine, MicroLit Almanac, Exit 7, and elsewhere, and his essay, “Good Bones,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. He graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2021. The two things he fears most in this world are sharks and clowns.  12/28/21

Michael Homolka is the author of Antiquity, winner of the 2015 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. His poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Boulevard, Antioch Review, Agni, and Poetry Daily. A graduate of Bennington College’s MFA program, he currently teaches high school students in New York City.  11/12/12, 9/26/16

Ann Hood is the bestselling author of the novels, The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was named one of the top ten books of 2008 and was a NYT Editors’ Choice. Her new memoir, Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love and Food, was an Amazon, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today best memoir and/or cookbook. Find her at www.annhood.us and @Annhood56 on Instagram and Twitter.  8/28/17

Ailish Hopper is the author of Dark~Sky Society (2014), selected by David St. John as runner-up for the New Issues prize, and the chapbook, Bird in the Head (2005), selected by Jean Valentine for the Center for Book Arts Prize. Individual poems have appeared in APR, Blackbird, Harvard Review online, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Rumpus, and other places. Her essays on art and literature that deal with race have appeared in Boston Review, and the anthology, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. She’s received support from the MacDowell Colony, Maryland State Arts Council, and Yaddo. Hopper teaches at Goucher College. She can also be found at www.ailishhopper.net, @ailishhopper, and https://newissuespress.com/darksky-society/.  4/27/15

Jeremy Horton is a writer living in Manhattan. He is originally from southern Mississippi and his home is the setting for his fiction. Horton’s interests include literature, film, languages, and a finely crafted hierarchy of neuroses.  6/26/17

Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir, Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (U of Iowa Press), and a book of poems, Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). Her essays and poems have appeared in such places as Post Road, The Florida Review, Upstreet, Terrain.org, Reed Magazine and Lilith Magazine. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and taught at RIT for many years. She grew up an army brat and often writes about those days that no longer exist. She’s at work on a collection of lyrical pieces and has just finished a memoir about her mother.  1/25/22

Hannah Howard is a writer and food person based in New York City. She is the author of two memoirs, Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen and Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family. She writes for New York Magazine, Salon, and SELF, teaches food writing classes, and loves stinky cheese.  3/27/17, 5/28/18, 10/26/21

Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of two novels, The Loved Ones, and Wavemaker II, and the story collection, Double Happiness. In January 2021, she published The Ocean House, a story cycle. She lives in upstate New York. For more information, please go to: www.mbhughesbooks.com.  7/27/15

Erica Hunt’s most recent work, published in 2013, is a new chapbook, A day and its approximates from Chax Books. She is a poet and essayist: the author of prose works, Local History and Arcade, as well as two chapbooks, Piece Logic and Time Flies Right Before the Eyes. Other bits have been published in Boundary 2, Conjunctions, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree, and in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, The Politics of Poetic Form, and other various anthologies. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation.  9/30/12, 11/24/14

Kay Iguh is a fiction writer and graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She completed a four-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center in June 2016. Her short story “House Girl” won the 2016 Disquiet Literary Prize and was published in Guernica. She is also a 2016 Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellow. She currently teaches creative writing to high school students. A native Nigerian, she grew up in Houston and now lives in Brooklyn.  2/27/17 

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar, (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University. You can find more at http://www.didijackson.com.  9/26/16  

Leigh Jackson is a former newspaper reporter and a proud graduate of Bennington’s MFA program. She lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she seeks a perfect balance of family and writing. She hasn’t found one so far, but she’s optimistic.  11/28/16  

This week, Major Jackson received the 2016 Vermont Book Award for his book, Roll Deep, published last year. He is the author of three other books of poetry: Holding Company (2010); Hoops (2007); and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a creative arts fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and been included in several volumes of Best American Poetry.  He lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Jackson is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.  9/26/16  

Nancy Jainchill, a psychologist, returned to writing after many years, receiving an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013. She’s read on NPR, contributed to Every Father’s Daughter, an anthology (McPherson Pub., 2015), and her work has appeared in The Woodstock Times, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Calyx, Entropy, the Freestate Review, Brevity, The Women’s Review of Books, Next Tribe, and the Albany Times Union. A feminist advocating for gender rights, her writing has focused on matters of sexual justice, discussing the rights of sex workers, and the role of pornography in establishing gender parity and sexual equity. She is working on a hybrid memoir about women whose lives have been groundbreaking in their attention to the politics of sex, as she explores her own related experiences and the evolution of her thinking. As an aside, Thai Thai’s Very Curly Tail is her first picture book. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @nancyjainchill.  10/28/13, 9/24/18

TJ Jarrett is a writer and software developer in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her recent work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, VQR, West Branch and others. Her work has been anthologized in Language Lessons from Third Man Books and Best American Non-Required Reading 2015. Jarrett’s debut collection, Ain’t No Grave, was published with New Issues Press (2013) and her second, Zion, winner of the 2013 Crab Orchard Open Competition, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in the fall of 2014. In 2017, she was awarded the George Garrett New Writing Award by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She is currently the Assistant Poetry editor at Acre Books.  4/24/17

Morgan Jerkins is a New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, which was longlisted for PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. Her third book, Caul Baby, was published in 2021 by Harper Books.  6/27/16

Alden Jones is the author, most recently, of the hybrid memoir The Wanting Was a Wilderness. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and her memoir, The Blind Masseuse, was named a notable travel book by National Geographic, Publishers Weekly, PEN America, and the Huffington Post. Her stories and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Agni, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and the Best American Travel Writing. She is core faculty in the Newport MFA, and also teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston.  11/25/13, 8/22/16, 8/28/17, 8/27/18, 2/24/21

Jamie-Lee Josselyn, a June ’11 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, is an Associate Director and instructor for the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also directs the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, Cleaver Magazine, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is the host of the literary podcast, Dead Parents Society. Jamie-Lee lives in South Philadelphia with her gentleman friend, her dog, and her two cats. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @jljosselyn.  6/24/13, 1/22/20

David Kalish is a novelist, essayist and recovering journalist. He wrote The Opposite of Everything, an award-winning comedic novel inspired by his brush with cancer and mortality, and his essay, “A Path to Fatherhood, With Morning Sickness,” appeared in The New York Times as a Modern Love column. Before his MFA at Bennington’s Writing Seminars, he was a journalist at The Associated Press for twelve years. He’s currently working on a second novel and a Latin-themed comedic musical. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, daughter, and two dogs. Find out more about David at www.davidkalishwriter.com.  9/30/13

In 2016, Mary Beth Kelly earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, reading nonfiction. As a clinical social worker, she conducts a private practice in psychotherapy on the Upper West Side where she has lived since 1976 and raised a family. Kelly is a cofounder of Families for Safe Streets and serves on the Board of Transportation Alternatives.  2/17/14

Tara Kelly earned a Masters in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2014. Since then, she has been revising her thesis, as she now views much of what she wrote very differently. She is a fan of Abigail Thomas and her vignette style of writing. Tara lives in Millbrook, NY.  10/28/13, 10/22/18

Miranda Kennedy is the author of the book Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India, a reported memoir that looks at the lives of women in a changing India. She is the Senior Editor of NPR’s Morning Edition in Washington, DC, and is working on a second memoir about religious belief. Kennedy also holds writing workshops for graduate students at American University and teaches long-form journalism to undergraduates at the University of Maryland. More can be found at mirandakennedy.com.  10/24/16

Dana Kinstler has won fiction prizes from Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, and the Southern Indiana Review, and her essays have been published in Good-Bye to All That, the Sunday London Telegraph, and several anthologies. She has degrees from Bennington and Brown and has taught at Bard College and Marist College. A 3^rd generation native New Yorker, Kinstler now lives in the Hudson River Valley.  1/23/16

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. His collection is titled What Keeps Me Awake (Silver Bow Publishing) and his chapbook is called Bossa Nova (River Glass Books). His work has appeared in AGNI, Streetlight Magazine, Delmarva Review, Right Hand Pointing, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.  1/22/18

Sheila Kohler is the author of ten novels, most recently Open Secrets published by Penguin in July 2020, which followed a memoir, Once We Were Sisters, in 2017, as well as three short story collections. She has received an O. Henry Award twice, the Open Voice Award, the Smart Family Foundation Prize, The Willa Cather Prize, and the Antioch Review Prize. Her work has been translated and published in thirteen countries and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications too numerous to mention. Kohler currently teaches at Princeton.  1/28/13

Moscow-born Nina Kossman is a painter, sculptor, bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, and playwright. A graduate of Bennington College, she is the author of two books of poems in Russian, as well as the translator of two volumes of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems. Her other books include Behind the Border (HarperCollins 1994), a collection of stories about her Moscow childhood, Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press 2001), and a novel. More information is available at ninakossman.com and at Instagram: ninakossman.art.  5/22/19

Parks Kugle writes a variety of styles, including fantasy, realism, and historical fiction. He has lived in Austin and New Orleans, where he worked for media companies and non-profits. In New Orleans, he edited and published a small zine titled Provocative. He is in the process of editing his first novel. Kugle currently attends Sarah Lawrence College for his Fiction MFA, therefore he lives in the Bronx.  10/23/17

Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of Six Thousand Miles to Home: A Novel Inspired by a True Story of WW II (2018), The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir (2016), I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (2010), and lead editor of You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person (2013). She is the founding editor of Welcome Table Press. For more information, visit www.kimdanakupperman.com and www.welcometablepress.org.  3/31/14

Becca J.R. Lachman works for her county’s public library system in SE Ohio and is also a lyricist and singer-songwriter. Her forthcoming third collection of poems, What I say to this house, is a collaboration with German artist Astrid Kaemmerling. Becca’s previous poetry collections are The Apple Speaks (Cascadia Publishing House) and Other Acreage (Gold Wake Press). In 2013, she edited A Ritual to Read Together, a national anthology to mark the centennial of the late poet and conscientious objector William Stafford that included new work by poets such as Robert Bly and Molly Peacock. Her most recent poems have been recognized by an 2020 Ohio Arts Council excellence award and a Pushcart Prize nomination and can be found in places like Connotation Press, Sweet: Lit, Consequence Magazine, and Image Journal. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June of 2011.  6/25/12, 4/24/17

Steven LaFond is a writer and podcast producer whose work has appeared in apt, The Drum, Little Fiction, The New Guard, and elsewhere. His most recent project is the Witchever Path Fiction Anthology podcast. Follow the Path at www.witcheverpath.com.  11/25/13, 11/27/17, 12/17/19

Danielle Decatur Lawrence is a fiction writer in the middle of her second term as a graduate student at the Bennington Writing Seminars.  She’s also a creative director for an advertising agency in the city; you’ve probably seen some of her work on television or flipping through a magazine.  10/23/17

Erica Plouffe Lazure is the author of a forthcoming short story collection, Proof of Me + Other Stories (New American Press, March 2022) and two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard Around Town (2015). Her fiction is published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches high school in Exeter, NH and can be found online at http://www.ericaplouffelazure.com  2/22/22

Ann Leamon has spent a lot of time putting words around various topics in various forms, but has recently focused on poetry, finance, and fiction. She studied in Canada, Germany, Montana, and, of course, earned an MFA in poetry from Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The Lyric, The Barefoot Muse, Hole in the Head Review, and The Boston Sunday Magazine, among others. She lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and golden retriever mix.  10/26/21

Woody Lewis is the author of Three Lost Souls: Stories about Race, Class and Loneliness. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI online, CONSEQUENCE magazine, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he spent most of his adult life in northern and southern California, returning in 2010 to New York City, where he is at work on a memoir and a novel about Silicon Valley.  7/29/13, 1/23/17

Julia Lichtblau’s essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in American Fiction, The American Scholar, Commonweal, The Common, Blackbird, Narrative, The Florida Review, Superstition Review, The Drum, The Jewish Journal, and elsewhere. She was book review editor of The Common for seven years, taught writing about business and the economy at Drew University, and was a reporter and editor in New York and Paris for BusinessWeek and Dow Jones for fifteen years. She has an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is completing a novel set in Côte d’Ivoire and Washington, D.C. She has been a finalist for the Dana Award for Short Fiction, Kore Press Short Fiction Contest, two American Fiction contests, two Narrative contests; won the 2011 Paris Short Story Contest and 2nd Prize in the Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest. Learn more at jmlichtblau@gmail.com.  5/29/14, 1/23/17, 8/14/19

Timothy Liu is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Let It Ride and Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain (1992-2017), a finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. In addition to being translated into ten languages, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Liu is a Professor of English at William Paterson University and was a Core Faculty member at the Bennington College Graduate Writing Seminars from 2005-2012. He has also taught at Hampshire College, Cornell College, University of California Berkeley, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of Michigan, and Tulane University. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Read more at www.timothyliu.net.  12/6/11

Born in Brooklyn, Phillip Lopate is the author of three essay collections: Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body; two novels: Confessions of Summer and The Rug Merchant; a pair of novellas; two poetry collections; and a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being with Children. Lopate has edited anthologies on a wide range of topics. His collection, The Art of the Personal Essay, is perhaps the best in its field. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, Hofstra, New York University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Lopate directs the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. He has two books forthcoming in March 2013 from The Free Press/Simon & Schuster, Portrait Inside My Head (personal essays) and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction.  2/25/13

Marcia B. Loughran won Mrs. Mott’s prestigious haiku prize in fifth grade and resumed her writing career thirty years later. She received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Pennsylvania English, Verdad, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Marcia’s chapbook, Still Life with Weather, won the 2016 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Prize. And her second prize-winning chapbook, My Mother Never Died Before and Other Poems, is now available at The Poetry Box website. She is a nurse practitioner and proud resident of Queens, NY. For more about Marcia, go to https://marciabloughran.com/  8/26/13, 8/14/19

In 2020, Amy Lyons earned a Best of the Net nomination in fiction, a Best Small Fictions nomination, and an honorable mention from the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Lunch Ticket, 100 Word Story, and Literary Mama, and her non-fiction in LA Weekly, Backstage, The Independent, Pulp, and more. Her work has been supported by an internship at the Boston Globe, a residency at Millay Colony for the Arts, and a fellowship from The Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She’s a Tin House and Squaw Valley Community of Writers alum, and former Vice President of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.  12/16/20

Fiona Maazel is the author of the novels Last Last Chance, Woke Up Lonely, and A Little More Human. She is winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  5/22/17

Sara Majka’s debut collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, was published by Graywolf Press / A Public Space Books this year. She studied writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She currently lives in Providence with her son. Sara’s website is saramajka.com.  7/29/13, 5/23/16

Kelly Marages is a New York City writer and magazine editor who has never lived in Brooklyn. Her essays, cultural criticism, and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Marie Claire, Us Weekly, Paste, Giant, and Men’s Health among other dead/dying print publications; she has also written on the internets at Vulture.com, Glamour.com, and other dot coms. She once wrote a monthly horoscope column under the pen name Luna C. As a Libra, she hopes you will fall in platonic love with her after learning this. Marages graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Bennington in June 2015, and, along with fellow grad Agatha French, is cofounder of the forthcoming literary project Four Eyes.  9/27/15

Cate Marvin’s fourth book, Event Horizon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press this May. She lives in Scarborough, Maine, and teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program. She is also a professor of English at the College of Staten Island.  2/22/22

Katie Marya is originally from Atlanta, Georgia and holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College. She received her BA in Spanish. Her work has appeared in The Rio Review and Prairie Schooner and is forthcoming in North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Five Points (as the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry). She was recently recognized with a 2017 Fall Fellowship at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She lives and teaches in Lincoln, Nebraska. Marya also loves dancing mambo style salsa and while she’s in NY, she’d love someone to take her out dancing.  12/18/17

Leslie Maslow’s writing has been published in Tin House, Open City, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and other journals. This month she is on the coast of Cornwall living aboard a 1950s Scottish herring trawler named “Jasmine.”  8/31/11, 3/27/17, 8/24/21

Jen Mathy wrote for WGN-TV in Chicago and has placed stories with The Chicago Tribune, Orange County Today, and elsewhere. She wrote the prose and poetry for An Expat Journey in Singapore, a book of photographs about the island nation. Jen is an independent marketing communications consultant and manages social media for Bennington Writing Seminars, among others. She is at work on her first novel. 6/27/16, 2/26/20

Alice Mattison is a widely acclaimed author and longtime writing teacher. Conscience is her seventh novel. The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale appeared in 2016. Her earlier novels include The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and When We Argued All Night, and she is also the author of four books of stories and a collection of poems. Twelve of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and other work has been published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Ecotone and has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. She has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and, for more than twenty years, in the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College. You can find more at – http://www.alicemattison.com/disc.htm.  5/26/14, 3/13/19

Pam Matz is a poet, librarian, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Memorious, Painted Bride Quarterly, Bloodroot, and Shadowgraph Quarterly.  She received her Bennington Writing Seminars MFA in Spring 2010, and in 2020 completed a master’s thesis on the 12th-century poet Baudri of Bourgueil.  9/25/19

Dan McDermott spent years as a rock and roll journalist before earning an MFA in fiction from The Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Gertrude, The Southampton Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Jersey Beat, and elsewhere. Dan teaches at Phoenix College, Paradise Valley Community College, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.  12/17/18, 11/23/21

Leslie McGrath was a poet and literary interviewer. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, she is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (2009), a poetry collection, and two chapbooks, Toward Anguish (2007) and By the Windpipe (2014.) McGrath’s most recent book is a satiric novella in verse, Out from the Pleiades (Jaded Ibis, 2014.) Her poems have appeared most recently in The Awl, AGNI, Salamander, and The Common. She taught creative writing and literature at Central Connecticut State University and was series editor of The Tenth Gate, a poetry imprint of The Word Works Press (Washington, DC).   12/29/14

Born in Egypt, Michael Meguid spent his childhood in Egypt, Germany, and England, attending medical school in London followed by a residency at Harvard Medical School. He is Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Nutrition, and Neuroscience at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY. Meguid subsequently earned an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. His short stories have appeared in The Bennington Review, Stone Canoe, Columbia Medical Review, and Hektoen International. The first volume of his autobiography, Roots & Branches: A Family Saga Like No Other, is available on Amazon and its sequel, Mastering the Knife: Seeking Identity and Finding Belonging, will be out next month. Meguid reads, writes, and lives on Marco Island, Florida with his four-legged muse, Lucy.  1/27/21

Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, will appear in 2021 from Grand Iota (UK). His novels include, What Is Told, a New York Times ‘Notable,’ The Ambassador of the Dead, considered one of the ‘Best Books of the Year’ by the LA Times, and The House of Widows, chosen for an Editor’s Choice Award by Booklist in 2008. Melnyczuk served as co-editor of From Three Worlds, New Writing from Ukraine and edited volumes of poetry and prose. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, and Ivan Drach. His shorter work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. As founding editor of AGNI, he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Melnyczuk has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Bennington College and currently at the UMass, Boston. His website is: https://askoldmelnyczuk.net.  3/30/15

Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, now a major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, Newsday, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine. Look for Susan’s website – https://www.susanscarfmerrell.com/ and find her on Twitter, https://twitter.com/susan_merrell, and Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/susanmerrell/  5/27/13, 9/29/14, 12/18/17

Linda Michel-Cassidy’s writing has appeared in Jabberwock, Harpur Palate, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others, and has been featured in The San Francisco Library’s Poem-a-Day project. She is a contributing editor at Entropy Magazine. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and another, in Visual Arts, from the California College of the Arts. She teaches and consults for the Mill Valley Library and is on the board of the Marin Poetry Society. She recently served a decade of voluntary exile in rural northern New Mexico, and now lives on a houseboat in California. More information available at: lmichelcassidy.com.  12/26/16

Jennifer Stewart Miller is the author of Thief (2021) winner of the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015), and a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Her poems have recently appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere, and have received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. She’s been living in Orleans, MA lately. For more information, visit www.JenniferStewartMiller.com. Twitter: @JStewartMiller.  11/12/12

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Most recently, Miller received a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and a congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism. His latest book If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press, was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Miller has two forthcoming books: When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories and the little book of e. Look for him at Instagram: @eugeneethelbertmiller, and Twitter: @ethelbertpoet.  8/25/14, 7/23/18

Sloane Miller, MFA, MSW, LMSW, holds graduate degrees from New York University and Bennington College. Since 2006, she has maintained a popular blog called, Please Don’t Pass the Nuts, about living well with asthma, allergies, and life-threatening food allergies. In 2007, Miller created a private practice helping those with severe dietary restrictions manage everyday life. In 2011, John Wiley & Sons published her lifestyle guide: Allergic Girl: Adventures in Living Well with Food Allergies. A nationally recognized expert and frequent public speaker, this is her first piece of creative nonfiction since 2000 to have nothing to do with food allergies.  7/29/13

Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer, graphic arts production manager, and a sighted guide for the visually impaired. He is a musician/composer, artist, and writer. Recently someone called him “one of those creatives.” He’s not sure if the term was meant to be pejorative or not. Michael took his MFA at Bennington College, co-founded Poetry Oasis Worcester, and was privileged to be an editor with Diner. His poetry book reviews, fiction, and poems have appeared in Agni, Diner, The New Orleans Review, The Valparaiso Review, Chaffin Journal, Blue Earth, Illuminations, Visitant and others. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  2/22/22

Monica Minott is the author of two collections of poetry, Kumina Queen and Zion Roses. She was awarded first prize in the inaugural Small Axe poetry competition and her poems have been published in The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe, Cultural Voice Magazine, SX Salon, Jubilation, Squaw Valley Review, and BIM magazine, as well as the anthology, Coming Up Hot: featuring Eight New Poets from the Caribbean. Monica Minott is also a Chartered Accountant. She received two awards in Jamaica’s National Book also a Chartered Accountant. She received two awards in Jamaica’s National Development Council’s annual literary competitions for book-length collections of her poetry.  4/23/18

Geri Modell  12/18/17, 1/23/19

Emily Mohn-Slate is the author of The Falls, winner of the 2019 New American Poetry Prize (New American Press) and Feed, winner of the 2018 Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, New Ohio Review, Muzzle Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches high school English by day and poetry workshops by night for the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MohnSlate.  2/24/21

Rena J. Mosteirin teaches at Dartmouth, owns Left Bank Books and edits Bloodroot Literary Magazine. Lydia Davis selected Mosteirin’s novella Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008) for the Kore Press Short Fiction Award. Mosteirin has a poetry chapbook called half-fabulous whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and is the co-author with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code.  12/17/19

Robert Moulthrop likes to say his career was kickstarted by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2005, he received the New York Fringe Outstanding Playwriting Award for his play, Half Life. His interest in playwriting has resulted in some 15 plays and 20 one-acts. His stories have appeared in such journals as Reed, Berkeley Fiction Review, Confrontation, Eclipse, The MacGuffin, and Sou’Wester. His story ‘Four Stories from the Quiet’ won first prize in Literal Latte’s 2010 Fiction Contest. And now Moulthrop’s debut short story collection, To Tell You the Truth, has been “highly recommended for followers of short fiction.” A graduate of Brandeis University (BA, Music) and the Catholic University of America (MA, Theatre), Robert lives and works in New York City.  5/19/14

Ruth Mukwana is a fiction writer from Uganda. She is also an aid worker working for the United Nations in New York. She’s a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA) and a 2020 Center for Fiction 2020 Emerging Fellows. Her short stories have appeared in Solstice Magazine, Black Warriors Review, Consequence Magazine and The Compassion Anthology, Speak the Magazine, The Wrath Bearing Tree, and Water~Stone Review. She lives with her daughter in New York and co-produces a podcast and blog, ‘Stories and Humanitarian Action,’ that investigates how storytelling can raise awareness and galvanize action to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises.  11/24/14, 11/27/19

Sean Murphy’s chapbook, The Blackened Blues, was published by Finishing Line Press in July 2021. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of 1455 (www.1455litarts.org). To learn more, and read his published short fiction, poetry, and criticism, please visit seanmurphy.net/ and @bullmurph.  9/28/21

Unni Nair graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars earlier this year in June. As an undergrad he read Philsosophy, and now he works as a freelance photographer and translator. He lives in The Bronx and has been published in The Indypendant, India Abroad, Creative Image Magazine, The Leaflet, American Bazaar, and The Indian Express. Writing this bio was harder than anything he wrote at Bennington.  10/23/19

Mara Naselli is an editor and writer. Her essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Agni, Ninth Letter, Your Impossible Voice, 3 Quarks Daily, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013 and is a recipient of a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.  2/23/15

Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbooks Study (Above/Ground Press, 2021) and A Second Singing (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, 2022). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2021 Autumn House Press Book Prize under the title “Hour Song.” She is the publicist and an assistant editor at Essay Press, editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She lives in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate at SUNY Buffalo.  4/26/22

YahNé Ndgo is a writer, singer, and activist. Her art and her advocacy focus on the restoration of equity among all living beings and the embodiment of love. In her work, she acknowledges struggle and suffering while concentrating on healing, she creates space for the voices of those who are typically marginalized, and she strives to eradicate poverty in her lifetime. She is Chief Visionary Officer of Deep Blu Womyn Company, a company of women artist administrators. Her daughter, Ishara, will be eighteen in a few weeks and is graduating high school. She is a singer, musician, and writer as well, and will study music and creative writing as an undergraduate in the fall.  5/25/15

Jimmy Newborg is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in Little Fiction, Critical Flame, and elsewhere.  2/27/12, 11/27/15, 5/28/18

Titi Nguyen’s essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares and Tin House blog, Paris Review Daily, Witness, and elsewhere. She earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has been the recipient of a tuition scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and was Crab Orchard Review‘s inaugural Feature Award in Literary Nonfiction. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Titi lives in New York City and is Project Coordinator for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She loves a good ghost story. Find out more at http://titinguyen.net. 11/24/14, 3/13/19

As a poet, Will Nixon has published three books, My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse, Love in the City of Grudges, and Acrostic Woodstock. With Michael Perkins, he has co-authored Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town and The Pocket Guide to Woodstock.  11/28/16

Conor O’Brien was raised in suburban Connecticut and now lives and works in urban New York. He graduated from New York University in 2013 with a degree in English Literature and is currently a second-term student of the Bennington Writing Seminars. As yet, he has no publishing credits to speak of.   1/23/17

As an actor, Michael O’Keefe has garnered both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. He’s appeared in the films, Eye in the Sky, Michael Clayton, Frozen River, The Pledge, Ironweed, The Great Santini, and Caddyshack. Television audiences will recognize him as CIA Agent John Redmond on Homeland and remember him as ‘Fred’ on Roseanne. O’Keefe’s current TV credits consist of Sneaky Pete and City On A Hill. On Broadway, he’s appeared in Reckless, Side Man, The Fifth of July and Mass Appeal for which he received a Theater World Award. As a writer, his lyrics were in the Grammy-winning song, ‘Longing in Their Hearts’, composed and sung by Bonnie Raitt. His writing has appeared in magazines such as BOMB, Mindful, Lake Affect, and Chaparral. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. O’Keefe has been a Zen practitioner for almost thirty years and is a Dharma Holder in the Zen Peacemaker Order.  4/25/16

Jeremy Oldfield  8/25/11 

Miriam O’Neal belongs to the Bennington Writing Seminars Class of ’99. Her work has appeared in Blackbird Journal, The Galway Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. The Body Dialogues, (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020), was nominated for a Massachusetts Center for the Book Award. Her first collection, We Start with What We’re Given, (Kelsay Press), came out in 2018. She also is a 2019 Pushcart nominee, a finalist for the 2019 Disquiet International Poetry Prize and the 2020 Princemere Poetry Prize. A portion of her translation of Italian poet, Alda Merini’s, Rose Volanti, appeared in On The Seawall in Fall of 2019. See more at miriamoneal.com.  8/25/14, 7/23/18, 1/25/22

O. Edwin Ozoma talks shit and sells books in Chicago. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he once had a brief conversation with Amy Hempel in the lunch line. He’s a cohost of the biannual Bennington Midwest Salon, despite being wholly Alaska grown, and he’s an editor at Midnight Breakfast. He writes stories and lyrical prose. He buys sneakers. He’s writing a novel as well as a story collection. He thinks referring to himself in the third person is weird.  3/22/22

When Stephen Page is not writing, reading, spending time with his spouse, communing with nature, or walking his dog, he is either accidentally on purpose losing his cell phone or making noise with his electric bass. He is part Apache, part Shawnee, part Mexican, part English, part Scottish, and part Irish. He wanders off a lot during social gatherings, showing up hours later at home.  11/23/21

Cheryl Pappas is author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press in 2021. Her work has appeared in Juked, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. She lives just outside Boston and runs the popular online Hermit Crab Flash Fiction Workshop. She can be found at cherylpappas.net and @fabulistpappas.  11/27/17, 9/28/21

Catherine Parnell is the author of the nonfiction book, The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, interviews and blog posts in Barnhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Redivider, TSR: The Southampton Review, Post Road, The Baltimore Review, roger, and many others. Look for Cat here: Facebook: catherine.parnell; Twitter: @catparnell;   Instagram: victoriancatherine.  12/28/17, 4/24/19

Seth Pase earned a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College where his short fiction was recognized in the annual Senior Writing Contest. Since earning an MAT in English from Union College, he has worked in education; currently, he leads writing across the curriculum initiatives in his role as Director of the Writing Center at Excelsior College. He earned an MFA from Bennington College in 2016 and writes character-driven fiction focused on the topical, the fantastic, and the confused. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York with his wife, daughter, stepdaughter, two murderous cats, and a fancy little dog named Duncan Idaho.  2/23/15 

Rachel Pastan is the author of the novels Alena (Riverhead, 2014), Lady of the Snakes (Harcourt, 2004), and This Side of Married (Viking, 2002). Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, Mademoiselle, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other places. Her new novel, In the Field, will be published by Delphinium in August 2021. As editor of the Swarthmorean newspaper (swarthmorean.com), she now mostly writes true stories of life in a small college town outside of Philadelphia.  9/29/14

Oona Patrick earned an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Salamander, and elsewhere, and she has received Notable Essay mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. She helped start the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon in 2011 and published an anthology last year called Behind the Stars, More Stars: The Tagus Press/Disquiet Collection of New Luso-American Writing. Most recently, Oona guest-edited of an issue of the St. Petersburg Review’s Springhouse Journal featuring all women writers in translation from Portuguese.  6/24/13, 12/28/15, 7/24/17, 1/22/20

Jeffrey Perkins earned his BA from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana and his MA in American Studies from University of Massachusetts Boston. He studied poetry at Bennington College where he received his MFA and was the recipient of the Jane Kenyon Memorial Scholarship. His poems have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, Memorious, Rhino, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, and other journals. His first book of poems, Kingdom, was released in 2020 by Spork Press. He lives in Los Angeles, California and you can find him online at https://thekingdompoems.com.  3/30/15, 4/26/22

Originally from rural north Idaho, Dana Perry is a Brooklyn-based freelance grant writer and copywriter. She holds an MA in Sociology from The New School and for the better part of the last decade has dedicated herself to the study of herbalism (so, honestly, she just writes a lot about plants). Find out more at: https://danamperry.com/ 12/26/16

You can find Susan Petrie (BWS ‘18) photographing the Hudson River or sharing her images of it on Instagram at: spetrie_100milehome. Hundred-Mile Home is also the name of her book, which is an analog story map of Albany, Troy, & the Hudson River. SUNY Press/Excelsior Editions published it in April.  9/25/17, 9/28/21

Sarah Phillips writes poetry sometimes. (Sometimes she steals lines from friends.)  12/30/13

William Pierce graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2003 and now edits AGNI with Sven Birkerts. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and other work in Little Star, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Electric Literature.  He is the author of the first book in English on the Knausgaard phenomenon, the monograph Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which debuted as a serialized, multi-part essay in The Los Angeles Review of Books.  Excerpts from his recently completed autofiction novel Twenty Sixteen have appeared in Harvard Review, the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, and Western Humanities Review.  3/30/15

Julia Pistell is the host of the podcast Literary Disco, which has been mentioned in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, and many more publications that know about such things. She has written for Book Riot, the Sunday Star-Ledger, Shondaland, and more. Julia is also the owner and Managing Director of the Sea Tea Comedy Theater in Hartford.  6/24/13, 3/23/21

Jo Pitkin received a BA in creative writing and literature from Kirkland College and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of The Measure (Finishing Line Press), Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York (The History Press) and Commonplace Invasions (Ireland’s Salmon Poetry). She edited the landmark anthology Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community (Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press). Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies such as: The New York Review of Books, Little Star, Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, Salamander, Stone Canoe, Nimrod International Journal, and Southern Humanities Review; and Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Pitkin lives in the Hudson River Valley in a former public schoolhouse built in 1830.  5/19/14

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, and teaches literature as well as creative writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, released in March 2022 from 7.13 Books, and was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Prize. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. Find her on Twitter,  @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram, @writerpoddar.  3/22/22

Rolf Potts is the author of four books, including Vagabonding (Random House, 2003), which has been through thirty-two printings and numerous international translations. His essays have appeared in venues such as National Geographic Traveler, The New Yorker, and The Best American Travel Writing series. He has taught semester-long nonfiction classes at Penn and Yale, and he hosts the Deviate with Rolf Potts podcast. He lives on a 30-acre farm in Saline County, Kansas with his wife, actress Kristen Bush. Potts is a June ’11 graduate of the Bennington Writers Seminars.   4/30/12, 3/26/18

Kerri Quinn is a New York City based writer and producer. Her stories feature strong, funny-as-hell female protagonists. Tragic themes and humor are present in her work and her stories almost always include a character who has died and a character grieving this death. In the vein of the Greek tragedies, all of Kerri’s characters die off stage. She has worked as a freelance creative consultant and scriptwriter for Q Media, an outdoor documentary film company based in Flagstaff, Arizona. She taught creative writing at Northern Arizona University and as well after-school creative writing workshops for young girls. She holds a PhD from The University of Southern Mississippi. A native New Yorker, Kerri has tried to live in other places—but always finds her way back to the City. For more about Kerri: https://www.kerriaquinn.com/ .  12/26/16

Meaghan Quinn is the author of Slow Dance Bullets (2019). She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College and has studied at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as The Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, the Pushcart Prize, and is a recipient of the Nancy Penn Holsenbeck Prize. Quinn has been featured in [PANK], Mass Poetry, and NPR Cape & Islands. Her work has been published in Salamander, Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, The Puritan, Off the Coast, Adrienne, Free State Review, and elsewhere. More about Meaghan at http://meaghanquinn.com. Follow her on Twitter – MeaghanQuinnpt and Instagram – meaghanaquinn.   9/25/19

Vassiliki Rapti holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College and co-Chair of the Ludics Seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She is the author of the monographs “Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond” and “Air, Water, Earth, Fire in the Poetry of Nikos Engonopoulos” and several poetry collections including “Transitorium”. She is also the Director of the International Translation Committee of Levure Litteraire and founder and director of the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop.  8/27/18

Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. He is the author of Fealty (Eyewear, 2018; Diode Editions, 2019), a finalist for the American Book Fest’s Best Book Award. He is also the founding editor of Rascal: a Journal of Ecology, Literature, and Art. His recent work can be found in The American Scholar, The Matador Review, Amaryllis, Scintilla, and Fugue. His awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, the Fortnight Poetry Prize, and a Whisper River Poetry Prize. He lives in Harlem with his wife, three cats and a Labradetter. Their bed, like any good home of the heart, is frequently overcrowded. Visit rickyray.co and rascaljournal.com for more.  11/26/18, 12/16/20

Mary Ellen Redmond’s poems have appeared in The Drunken Boat, Free State Review, 5 AM, Comstock Review, Cape Cod Review, Rattle, and The Cortland Review, but the publication she is most proud of is the poem tattooed on her son’s ribcage. A former slam poet, she represented Cape Cod at the National Poetry Slam Competition in Providence, RI. She has been featured twice on WCAI’s Poetry Sundays and her interview with poet Greg Orr was featured in The Drunken Boat. Her poem “Fifty-Six Days” earned her a Best of the Net Nomination in 2016. This is her twenty-seventh-year teaching English to middle and high school students. The Ocean Effect, her second chapbook, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press.  6/25/12

Camille Renshaw has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in publications such as The Mississippi Review, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice. She has been on a publication hiatus for the last decade, while she has worked to revive deteriorating downtown districts and their artistic communities nationwide. Her recent return to writing and her ongoing urban real estate investments are focused on cities and their stories. Camille lives in Greenpoint in Brooklyn.  5/26/14

Sue Repko’s essays have been named notable in The Best American Essays three times and have appeared in the Brevity Blog, Hazlitt, Hippocampus, Southeast Review, The Common, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She recently completed a memoir about her dad, guns, and an unintentional shooting and is looking for an agent. Follow her on Twitter @suerepko or her website www.suerepko.com.  8/25/11, 6/26/19, 8/24/21

Mickey Revenaugh is of two minds about many things. Her 2017 Bennington MFA is dual genre, Nonfiction and Fiction. She’s trying to get one book published about how much she hates paper and is working on another one about marijuana. Mickey’s writing has appeared in Cagibi, Cleaver, Catapult, Chautauqua, Lunch Ticket, and The Tishman Review, among others. Mickey was a finalist for the 2018 New Millennium Awards, the 2017 Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, and 2017 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award. She divides her time between literary pursuits and a day job in international education technology, while striving to embrace duality. There’s more information at mickeyrevenaugh.com.  1/26/15, 1/23/19, 6/26/19, 8/14/19

Maya Ribault, a French-American poet, is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has also found support for her poetry through Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency. Her poems, including a translation, have appeared in Agni, Bloodroot, Cloudbank, North American Review, Speak, The New Yorker, and The Southampton Review Online. Her chapbook, Hôtel de la Providence, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2020. She is currently the writer-in-residence at St. Albans in Washington, DC.  4/27/21

David Rigsbee is the author of This Much I Can Tell You, from Black Lawrence Press, as well as Not Alone in My Dancing:  Essays and Reviews. The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and awards from The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Academy of American Poets, he is also contributing editor to The Cortland Review. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.  12/26/16

Walter M. Robinson is a physician and writer in southeast Massachusetts, where he runs a residency for artists and writers (eastoverart.net). He is an editor at EastOver Press (eastoverpress.com), a small press and publisher of the online journal Cutleaf (cutleafjournal.com). His literary writing has appeared in The Sun, The Literary Review, Harvard Review, wildness, and Months to Years.  9/30/12

Bree A. Rolfe lives in Austin, TX where she teaches writing and literature to the mostly reluctant, but always lovable, teenagers at James Bowie High School. She is originally from Boston, Massachusetts where she worked as a music journalist for 10 years before she decided she wanted to dedicate her life to writing poetry and teaching. Her work has appeared in Saul Williams’ poetry anthology Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, The Barefoot Muse Anthology Forgetting Home: Poems About Alzheimer’s, the Redpaint Hill Anthology Mother is a Verb, and 5AM Magazine. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first chapbook Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in September of 2021. Further information can be found on her website: breerolfe.com, or on Twitter @garageclubpoet or Instagram: theofficialmsrolfe.  3/23/21

Isabel Rose is the author of the novel, The J.A.P Chronicles, published by Doubleday. Her nonfiction has been published in various anthologies and her blog, The Rose Note, is followed by 100,000 followers. In addition to writing, Isabel is also a recording artist whose most recent album, Trouble in Paradise, was released by Sony. Her many videos are available for viewing on YouTube. Isabel also works as a professional organizer, so if you need help, reach out! Isabelbydesign.com.  6/27/16

Andy Rosenzweig spent 30 years fighting crime and corruption in New York City before undertaking a Masters degree in Creative Writing, which he earned from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2012. His career was chronicled in Philip Gourevitch’s New Yorker article and book, A Cold Case. Rosenzweig has published two detective novels, Harry at the Precipice and Wiremen and is currently at work on a sequel to his first, to be called Harry’s on the Farm. He lives in White Plains with his wife, Mary.  6/25/18

Judy Rowley, who was born in Australia, began her writing life while living in South Korea as a ‘trailing spouse.’ To deepen her commitment to poetry and literature she completed a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at Manhattanville, NY and an MFA in Poetry at Bennington Writing Seminars. She writes poetry and essays, which have been published in several journals, and has recently published a memoir called Expected Home.  10/26/15, 5/28/18

Michael Ruhlman is the author of a dozen narrative nonfiction books. In Small Measures, a collection of three novellas, is his first fiction. His most recent books are Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, and the cookbook, From Scratch: 10 Meals, 175 Recipes. On Twitter and Instagram he’s @ruhlman. For more information, go to Ruhlman.com.  8/28/17

David Ryan is the author of the story collection, Animals in Motion, and the hybrid memoir/criticism Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Epiphany, The Southampton Review, Diagram, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New England College.  9/29/14, 7/27/15, 2/26/20

Erin Kate Ryan’s debut novel, Quantum Girl Theory, is based on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden from Bennington College in 1946. Erin Kate’s short fiction has appeared in VQR, The Normal School, Conjunctions, Glimmer Train, among other places. She’s a McKnight Artist Fellow, a James Jones First Novel Fellow, and the recipient of grants and scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. She holds a JD from Boston University and an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was an Alumni Fellow in Fiction. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner and found family.  3/22/22

Hugh Ryan’s first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. His next book, The Prison on Christopher Street, explores NYC’s Women’s House of Detention and the queer case for prison abolition. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association. Ryan is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and is represented by Robert Guinsler at Sterling Lord Literistic. @Hugh Ryan.  4/30/12, 3/28/16, 6/26/19

Mariana Sabino graduated recently from the Bennington Writing Seminars, which resulted in a collection of short stories inspired by her experiences living in countries as disparate as Brazil, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the U.S., and Ireland. A sense of displacement and search for an elusive home informs her writing. Glimpses of it can be found in Paris Lit Up Magazine and Mediterranean Poetry.  8/24/21

Viplav Saini, a native of Delhi, is a Kundiman fellow and has published work in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Southern Review. He teaches economics at NYU. Find him on Instagram – www.instagram.com/villap_saini/.  8/14/19

Christopher Salerno is the author of five books of poetry. His most recent book, The Man Grave, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books. Previous books include Sun & Urn (UGA Poetry Prize), ATM (Georgetown Poetry Prize), Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and Whirligig. His trade book, How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal, is available from Calisto Media. His work has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, The Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the BA and MFA programs in Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum.  11/12/12, 12/30/13, 4/24/17, 1/25/22

Cathy Salibian’s early career as an international currency smuggler ended when she was toilet trained and her mother stopped tucking contraband bills between her diapers on transatlantic flights. Born in Casablanca, she grew up on Long Island watching her Armenian family haul great hanks of lamb out of the trunk of their silver-finned Buick. Her sincerest childhood wish was to be normal like other people. This was not to be. Salibian has worked as a patient educator at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinics, an editor at the Rochester Business Journal, and as a freelance marketing communications consultant. She graduated in June 2014 from the Bennington Writing Seminars and persists in the belief that MFA stands for Most Famous Author.  12/28/15

Hayden Saunier’s newest book of poetry is a A Cartography of Home (Terrapin, 2021) Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, and has been published widely.  She is the founder and director of NoRiverTwice (poetry + improvisation), an interactive, audience driven poetry reading/performance, and is an actor with extensive theatre credits and recent appearances in Mindhunter, House of Cards, Outsiders, and Do No Harm. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Find more online at www.haydensaunier.com.  4/28/14, 1/22/18

Julie Scarr 1/23/19

Erika Schickel is the author of The Big Hurt (Hachette Books, 2021) and You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (Kensington Books, 2007). She has taught memoir and essay writing at UCLA and privately. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, LA City Beat, Salon, Ravishly, Tin House, Bust Magazine, and The LA Review of Books, among others. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Find out more at www.erikaschickel.com.  9/28/21

Dagmar Schnau Liesl Schwabe’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, The Rumpus, and The Washington Post, among other publications. She served as a 2018-19 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Kolkata, India and currently directs the Writing Program at Yeshiva College.  2/25/13, 10/23/19

David Lerner Schwartz teaches at the University of Cincinnati, where he is a doctoral student and the recipient of a graduate enhancement scholarship. His work has been published in Witness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Hub, New York magazine, The Rumpus, and more. He served as the 38th writer in residence at St. Albans in Washington, DC and works as the fiction editor of Four Way Review. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he was supported by an MFA Alumni Writer’s Grant. You can find him at davidlernerschwartz.com.  1/22/18, 1/23/19

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a Brooklyn native, is the author of twenty-eight books, which include novels, story collections, nonfiction, essays, poetry, as well as translations from Italian.  Her most recent publication is Truthtelling, a collection of stories.  Her first novel, Rough Strife, was nominated for a National Book Award. Notable books of hers are the novels Disturbances in the Field and the coming-of-age story, Leaving Brooklyn, a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee; the memoir Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager.  Her latest poetry collection is See You in the Dark. Schwartz is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Manhattan. 2/27/12,9/27/15

A Pushcart-nominated writer, Aurvi Sharma has been awarded the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Prairie Schooner Essay Prize, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the AWP Emerging Writer Prize. Sharma’s work has also appeared in Fourth Genre and Essay Daily. She recently received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship.  3/28/16

Julia Shipley spent her twenties in a vagabond college program called ‘The Bus,’ between stints as a farmhand on organic farms and dairies. She completed an MFA from The Bennington College Writing Seminars in January 2002 while serving as an office assistant at the Vermont Studio Center. Her first book of poems, The Academy of Hay, won the 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Adam’s Mark, named a 2014 Best Book About New England by the Boston Globe. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, FIELD, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, Poet Lore, and Verse Daily. Shipley’s essays can be found in December Magazine, Fourth Genre, Gettysburg Review, and Orion Magazine. She practices freelance journalism on her subsistence farm in Northern Vermont, where she is at work on a nonfiction book.  10/26/15

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco is a writer, educator, and activist. He received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is finishing his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. Ricco has taught writing at Boston College, The Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and the Massachusetts College of Art. He has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, and The National Endowment for the Humanities. Ricco is a board member of Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American literature. He lives in San Francisco, where he is a Grade Dean at the Urban School of San Francisco. His first book of stories, The Foley Artist, was published by Gaudy Boy Press in 2019. His website is www.riccosiasoco.com. 11/24/14, 1/23/17

Leah Silverman writes fiction and nonfiction, which certain members of her family say is the same thing. She’s also an abstract artist. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Southeast Review, Lunch Ticket, and River Teeth, and her essay, “Papa,” was named a Notable in Best American Essays 2020. Her fiction, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, JewishFiction.net, Web del Sol, and Meridian. A metropolitan Detroit native transplanted to Durham, NC, Leah holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is working on a memoir and writes in part to increase awareness of domestic violence and sexual abuse in the Jewish community.  10/26/21

Jessica Silvester is a senior editor at New York Magazine and a former editor at O, The Oprah Magazine. Her work has appeared in those publications, as well as The New York Times. She has appeared on The Today Show, Good Day New York, NY1, and WNBC. Look for her on Twitter @jmsilves.  7/24/17

Christine Simek lives and writes in the Hudson Valley.  2/17/14

Dustin Beall Smith is the recipient of the 2007 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in nonfiction for his book, Key Grip: A Memoir of Endless Consequences (Houghton Mifflin 2008). His essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, The Louisville Review, New York Times Sunday Magazine, River Teeth, The Sun, Writing on the Edge, and elsewhere. His work has received Notable Mentions in Best American Essays in 2008 and 2009, and in Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses, 2010. Smith teaches creative writing and first-year seminars at Gettysburg.  4/2/14

Irene Hoge Smith is a writer and psychologist living near Washington, D.C. She is a graduate of and ongoing participant in the New Directions writing program of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, and a writing workshop recidivist in Dinty Moore’s creative nonfiction class at the Kenyon Review Summer Writing Workshop which is where I met her. Her essays have appeared Amsterdam Quarterly, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Stonecoast Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Wisconsin Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere. Her memoir, The Good Poetic Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, about her lost-and-found mother, the late poet francEyE [France-eye] who lived with Charles Bukowski in the early 1960s, was published by IPBooks in 2021.  10/26/21

James Adams Smith writes nonfiction, humor, and short stories. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Defenestration Magazine, and Coda Quarterly. He is a regular contributor to Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, a queer magazine. He lives in Delaware, where he is studying to become an occupational therapist.  2/25/13, 2/27/19

William Bryan Smith was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1971. Smith’s novel, Free Range Men, is available from Main Street Rag. His novel, The Late, Great Thor McHugh, was published by Aardwolfe Books and can be found on Amazon Kindle. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a graduate of Mansfield University. Will’s humor writing has appeared at Points in Case, Robotbutt, and Medium.  Look for Will at www.williambryansmith.com. And on Twitter: @wbryansmith.  8/27/12, 9/30/13, 7/27/15, 3/13/19

Maura Snell is a January 2014 BWS grad who writes poetry and creative nonfiction, and is a content developer for various organizations around the country. She is currently collaborating with a restaurateur from Boston ghost writing her memoir, In Safe Hands with You, due out in 2022. She lives in Vermont with her husband.  3/30/15, 1/25/22

Jennifer Solheim’s fiction and essays have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. One of her stories in Bellevue was performed at their Page to Stage series at the NYU Langone School. She holds a PhD in French from the University of Michigan and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. The author of the critical work, The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2018), Jenn currently teaches courses on literature and culture at the University of Illinois – Chicago. She is also Associate Director of the BookEnds program at Southampton Arts of Stony Brook University, and a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review.  9/28/21

Liz Solms lives between her hometown of Philadelphia and the island of Jamaica. Her writing has appeared in Post Road, Wasafiri, The Village Voice, War Literature & The Arts, and Diner Journal, among other publications.  She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, the Breakwater Prize in poetry, and a two-time finalist for Glimmer Train’s New Writer Award. She holds an MFA from Bennington College.  3/25/13, 4/24/19

Sofi Stambo won the first prize in fiction in 2015 Dzanc Books/ Disquiet International literary contest. She won the second prize in 2016 No Tokens fiction contest and was a finalist in the American Short Fiction contest. Stambo was selected by Wigleaf for their 2016 best flash top list. She has a Master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University (Saint Kliment Ohridski) in Bulgaria and was a graduate student in Literature at City College New York. Stambo attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2016. One of her stories was nominated for the Pushcart prize 2018.  2/27/17 

Claudia M. Stanek’s work has been turned into a libretto, been part of an art exhibition, and translated into Polish. Her poems have been published in her chapbook Language You Refuse to Learn, as well as in Atticus Review, Rust + Moth, Aji, Inscape, and The Homestead Review, among others. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A founding member of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), Claudia lives in Tennessee.  3/23/21

Page Hill Starzinger’s second poetry collection, Vortex Street, launched in June 2020 from Barrow Street Press. Her first book, Vestigial, was selected by Lynn Emanuel to win the 2012 Barrow Street Book Prize. And in 2009, her chapbook, Unshelter, was chosen by Mary Jo Bang as winner of the Noemi Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, American Poetry Review, Fence, Volt, and others. Starzinger was Copy Director at Aveda for almost twenty years.  11/18/20

Julie Stern has had stories published in Room Magazine, The Owen Wister Review and read aloud in the Los Angeles New Short Fiction Series. She works for the design company, BassamFellows, whose work is on the cover of July 2019 Wallpaper Magazine. She has lived in a lake house in Lugano, Switzerland, a dance hall in Topanga Canyon, California, and presently resides in a cottage in Bethel, Connecticut – hometown of P.T. Barnum.  10/27/14, 7/24/19

Angelique Stevens is mixed Ho-denna-SHAW-nee and Italian-American living in Upstate New York where she teaches creative writing, literature of genocide, and race literatures. Her nonfiction can be found in LitHub, The New England Review, The Chattahoochee Review and a number of anthologies. She is a founding member of the Straw Mat Writers Group and a member of the Board of Directors of Water for South Sudan. She finds her inspiration in wandering—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger. She is currently writing a memoir about her experiences growing up in New York State.  11/18/20

Kathleen Stone is a writer and a lawyer. Her recently published book, They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men (Cynren Press), is a collective biography of women who defied expectations and broke barriers by entering male-dominated professions in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Her book reviews, art reviews and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Arts Fuse, Los Angeles Review of Books, Timberline Review and The Writer’s Chronicle. Kathleen lives in Boston and holds graduate degrees from the Bennington Writing Seminars and Boston University School of Law. Her website is www.kathleencstone.com.  9/25/19, 3/22/22

Dalena Storm is a writer and educator living in Williamstown, Mass. Her first book, The Hungry Ghost (Black Spot Books, 2019), is a fast-paced LGBTQ+ thriller. She is currently working on a joint speculative fiction project with her partner, Jason Storm. Link to Amazon author page: https://amzn.to/2NA0rUa.  5/25/15

Born and raised in the Bronx, Joe Stracci currently lives in Connecticut, in a house described on the land survey as an “underground dwelling.” His first novel, Whitney, was the winner of the 2011 New Rivers Press MVP Competition and will be published on October 15th, 2013. Joe’s fiction has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Inkwell, PANK Magazine, Specter Magazine, and Word Riot. Joe teaches at Manhattanville College, blogs at joestracci.org, and reads for PANK Magazine.  5/27/13

Susan Swenson holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and an MA from the New School for Social Research Graduate Studies. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, The Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet Magazine, and elsewhere. Her artist interviews have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues. Swenson co-founded and served as editor of Pierogi Press. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where she is co-owner of Pierogi Gallery with her husband, Joe Amrhein. 4/27/15

T. Tallon teaches English to artsy high school students who draw him in his natural form: a cartoon. He once got blackballed from college radio for making an inappropriate joke about underage drinking. He has been laboring on a novel for six years. He assumes it will be another six years until he writes page two. He is grateful for the chance to read to other people because he sometimes stays up late at night––with a martini––reading vindictively at the books on his shelves, much to his husband’s chagrin.  2/27/12, 11/27/19

Kelly Tanner-Backenroth holds an MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature from NYU. She works in Human Resources for an architecture firm. Her short stories and memoir have been published in the journals Pigeon Pages, Black Fox Literary Magazine and Dovetail. Kelly lives in the Hudson Valley in New York. Find her on Twitter: thatkellytanner and Instagram: thatkellyyouknow.  12/17/18

Hannah Tennant-Moore is the author of the novel Wreck and Order (Hogarth/Random House, 2016). Her writing appears in Salon, The New York Times Book Review, n+1, Tin House, The New Republic, and the Paris Review Daily. Check out her work at hannahtennantmoore.com.  4/30/12

Brent Terry’s poems, stories, plays, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines. He is the author of the poetry collections yesnomaybe, Wicked, Excellently, and the recently released Troubadour Logic, as well as a forthcoming novel, The Body Electric. Among the honors he has garnered are a fellowship from the Connecticut Arts and Tourism Board and the 2017 Connecticut Poetry Prize, as well as nominations for ‘Best of the Net’ and Bettering American Poetry. Terry has worked with writers of all ages and abilities, and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Connecticut State University. He lives in and runs the trails around Willimantic, CT. 12/30/14, 5/22/19 

Clifford Thompson’s books include Love for Sale and Other Essays (2013) and What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019). His first graphic novel, Big Man and the Little Men, is due out from Other Press in Fall 2022.  3/27/17, 1/22/20, 8/24/21

Joe Tobias is a resident surgeon at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. He graduated with his MFA in poetry in June 2017 and still misses Bennington! His poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review.  8/25/14, 8/27/18 

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons; 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh; and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s 2009 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for works that “contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.” His essays and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, A Public Space, and The New York Times Travel Magazine, and he has published short stories in such journals as TriQuarterly, Story Quarterly, BOMB, and Benzene. His honors include the Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and residencies at Yaddo and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre. Trachtenberg is an associate professor in the Writing Program and a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He’s now working on a nonfiction book, called The Last Artists in New York, that will be published by Black Sparrow Press in 2023. He can be found at www.petertrachtenberg.com and on Twitter @tshakti.  10/28/13

Erin Trahan was born in the same town as Madonna and grew up in the Cherry Capital of the World. Her writing runs the gamut from poetry to personal essays, from arts journalism to Frommer’s travel guides. She’s been a regular contributor to WBUR Boston since 2013 and teaches film journalism at Emerson College. For the possibility of more up-to-date news, check out at www.erintrahan.com or @etrahan.  11/25/13

After ten years as a filmmaker, Randi Triant received an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Treehouse was selected as an ultimate summer read by the LGBTQ culture site AfterEllen.com. Her second novel, A New Life, will be published in June 2021. Randi has taught writing at Emerson College and Boston College, and lives in Provincetown. She can be found on Instagram @randitriant and on Facebook.  6/25/18

Anamyn Turowski is a designer and writer. Publishing credits include New Ohio Review (Pushcart nomination), Fugue, The Forge Literary Magazine, Epiphany, among others. She was a recent finalist for the American Short(er)Fiction contest and received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest. Turowski is a graduate of Bennington’s Writing Seminars.  7/24/19

Karen Uhlmann, formerly a magazine writer covering topics such as the best beauty products for your wedding day, how not to lose your mind while remodeling your kitchen, and the top five potato salads, is now hard at work on a short story collection. Some of these stories have appeared in the Southern Indiana Review, Enizagam, Specter Magazine, and Fiction Southeast. Her short story, ‘Amalfi’, won the 2012 Northern Colorado Writers award judged by Antonya Nelson and appeared in its anthology. Uhlmann received her MFA in fiction and literature from Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2010.  1/27/14, 8/28/19

Paul Van Sickle’s work has appeared in Cagibi, New World Writing, and the Showbear Family Circus. He studied fiction at Bennington College and attended Tin House’s 2019 Summer Workshop as a short fiction writer. When not in a pandemic, he makes hats at the Metropolitan Opera and is the editor of Merde: a zine documenting modern dance and performance art.  11/18/20

William T. Vandegrift, Jr. received his MFA in 2003 from the Bennington Writing Seminars.  His work has appeared in multiple publications such as: AGNI online, Quarterly West, Kelsey Review, Eyes of Desire, Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Chronicle. He has been awarded residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Casa Libre en la Solana, and twice at the David and Julia White Colony in Costa Rica. An author, interviewer, and former restaurant reviewer, he is now focused on completing his novel and a memoir. He resides outside of Princeton, New Jersey with his partner, three cats, and two dogs.  5/25/15

Katherine Vaz is the author of two novels, Saudade, a Barnes and Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ selection, and Mariana, published in six languages and picked by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998. Her collections, Fado & Other Stories, won a Drue Heinz Literature Prize and Our Lady of the Artichokes won a Prairie Schooner Award.  Her children’s stories have appeared in anthologies by Viking, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster, and her short fiction has appeared in many magazines. She’s the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded by the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division). Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a citation as a Portuguese-American Woman of the Year, and an appointment to the six-person Presidential Delegation (Clinton) to the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon. Vaz lives in New York City.  2/29/16

Sasha Wade, a recent graduate of Bennington College’s MFA Writing Program, also attended Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Sasha’s poetry is inspired by her passion for visual art, nature, and family. Poems of hers have been published in Rust + Moth, The James Dickey Review, Third Wednesday, Front Porch Review, and The American Journal of Poetry.  4/24/19

Patti Wahlberg’s poetry has appeared in Slipstream, Pearl, Solace In so Many Words, and other publications. Her greatest obstacle in life: imposter syndrome. Her greatest accomplishment: the successful raising of two daughters who care about the environment, do good things in the world, and love their mommy. She lives deep in the woods of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with her beloved husband who patiently proofreads everything she writes, even this bio and two toy poodles and a pit, all rescues except the husband, who rescued her. She is currently working on a novel and poetry collection.  12/28/21

Casey Walker is the author of the novel Last Days in Shanghai.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University.  2/27/17 

Sarai Walker graduated from Bennington in June 2003. As a magazine writer, her articles appeared in national publications, including Seventeen and Mademoiselle. She subsequently served as an editor and writer for Our Bodies, Ourselves before moving to London to complete a PhD. Dietland, her first novel, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May.  7/27/15

Mark Wallace’s journalism and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Philadelphia Independent, among many others. He is Executive Director of the Writers Grotto (http://writersgrotto.org/), a nonprofit community of narrative artists, and is at work on a novel. He lives with his wife and their many children on the California coast, and can be found occasionally on Twitter at @markwallace.  7/24/19

Barrett Warner ranges in South Carolina where he divides his time between rubbing horses and various gentlemanly pursuits. He is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco Press), My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius Press), and ‘Til I’m Blue in the Face (Tropos Press). Recent poems and essays are in Carolina Quarterly, Sou’wester, Pirene’s Fountain, Every Artist, Beloit Poetry Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Disquiet Arts. He is also a book reviewer known for his jaunty style, as well as the editor of Free State Review and its publisher Galileo Press. Find out less about him at his website, https://barrettwarner.com/.  6/25/12, 12/30/14, 4/27/21

Susan Jay Watson continues to receive encouraging rejections regarding how seriously her fiction has been read. Two chapters from her novel in stories have been published and, at present, she is working on her fourth draft while not yet abandoning all hope due to people like V and her editor Alexandra Shelley and the Jane Street writers’ workshops and all who come to support these readings.  8/27/12, 11/27/15, 11/27/19

Naomi Wax is the coauthor of What We Keep: 150 People Share the One Object that Brings Them Joy, Magic, and Meaning (Running Press, 2018). Her essays, reviews, journalism, and cultural critiques have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Iowa Review, Condé Nast Traveler, and other publications. She regularly writes about medicine, health, and social justice for the Ford Foundation and other global nonprofits. An occasional ghostwriter, she is also the author/coauthor of several books for children and young adults. She has an MA in literature from the Bread Loaf School of English and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bennington. Someday, she hopes to revive her beloved blog, Pill Girl Report, which she let lapse some years ago.  10/24/16, 9/24/18

Catherine Weber is an award-winning poet, storyteller, and artist working with encaustic, photography, paper, and textiles. She regularly performs both poems and short stories at a Moth-style story slam called ‘Wake Up and Smell the Poetry’ in Hopkinton, Mass. She is the project director of Art on the Trails (artonthetrails.com) which combines a juried art exhibition with ekphrastic poetry on the trails of a nature preserve in Southborough, Mass. Weber holds a BA in Communications from Emerson College and an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  6/26/17

Daniel Webster Jr. is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Local Magazine, a print publication that showcases one town in America per issue. Currently, he is freelance proposal writing for NASA-based projects, while editing and writing a collection of essays about western Pennsylvania, ones that he hopes to print in something that he didn’t publish. He is sorry if you missed the featured readers from August and September (E. Ethelbert Miller & Rachel Pastan), who are overwhelmingly more professional and productive in their literary lives. Webster earned his MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January ‘12.  10/27/14

Tim Weed’s novel, Will Poole’s Island. was recently released in a new audiobook edition. His short fiction collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, made the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Shortlist. Tim is the winner of a Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Award and his writing has appeared in Literary Hub, The Millions, CRAFT, The Writer’s Chronicle, Fiction Writers Review, and many others. He’s on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing and co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program. Read more at www.timweed.net & on Twitter @weedlit.  8/22/16, 8/28/17, 8/27/18

John West writes and codes. He is currently the lead technologist in the R&D Lab of the Wall Street Journal, where he uses computers to find and report stories. His essays and reporting have appeared at the Journal, Quartz, Fast Company, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Boston with his partner, a baby, and a cat. Here’s where one can find him: Twitter: @johnwest, Website: http://beebe-west.com/john.  12/18/17, 1/23/19, 9/25/19

Sarah Wetzel is the author of the poetry collections The Davids Inside David, recently released from Terrapin Books, River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2010. When not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is Publisher and Editor at Saturnalia Books, https://saturnaliabooks.com/, and a PhD student in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. You can find her work at www.sarahwetzel.com. 6/25/12, 10/26/15, 7/23/18, 8/14/19

Lily White has spent most of her adult life composing music and playing jazz saxophone, performing in clubs and jazz festivals around the world. In 2013, she earned an MFA from Bennington College. Since then, her writing has appeared in Brevity, Caffeine Press, The Bennington Review, The Southampton Review, and The New York Times. White’s website is http://www.lilywhitewords.com   4/30/12, 1/26/15, 3/27/17, 11/18/20

Mary Beth “Betsy” Witherup reported on conditions in cities and countries around the world for more than 30 years before turning her pen toward her own experience traveling, working, and living abroad. She is currently working on a book based on stories from her travels. She has authored three picture books for children: The Alligator on the Escalator, The Turtle and the Butterfly, and Song of the Shepherd Boy. She lives in New York City.  8/27/18 

Katrina Woznicki lives in Los Angeles and has worked as a journalist for twenty-five years. Her reporting and essays have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, AFAR, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Week, Catapult, US News & World Report, and AAA’s Westways. In 2017, her essay “Alive Among Italy’s Dead” written for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel is represented by RXD Literary Agency, and focuses on relationships, landscapes, and climate change. She is currently working on her second novel. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @katrinawoz.  8/22/16

Poet Mark Wunderlich was appointed Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars in August 2017. His most recent volume, The Earth Avails, was published by Graywolf in 2014, receiving the 2015 Rilke Prize. Voluntary Servitude, his second book, came out in 2004 also through Graywolf. His first, The Anchorage, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999, earned the Lambda Literary Award. His poems, interviews, reviews, and translations have appeared widely. Wunderlich has taught at Stanford and Barnard and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Ohio University, San Francisco State University, and Sarah Lawrence. As an arts administrator, he has worked at the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Poets & Writers, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. He lives in the Hudson River Valley and has taught at Bennington College since 2004. 4/28/14, 4/23/18

Heather Young is the author of two novels. Her debut, The Lost Girls, won the Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award. The Distant Dead was published on June 9, 2020 and was named one of the Best Books of Summer by People Magazine, Parade, and CrimeReads. A former antitrust and intellectual property litigator, she traded the legal world for the literary one and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes, bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people that she wishes she’d written.  12/16/20

Elizabeth Ziemska is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her fiction has appeared in such places as Tin House, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Tordotcom, and The Pushcart Prize XLI. She has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize. Follow her on Twitter @Ziemska or on Instagram @crittaceous. 9/27/15

Marilyn Martin Zion is a writer and learning specialist in private practice. She holds a B.A in English literature from the University of Chicago, a Masters degree in learning and reading disabilities from Vermont College of Union Institute, and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College. Her essays have appeared in Third Coast, Gulf Coast, Catamaran, Lake Effect, Chautauqua and elsewhere. She is the author of the nonfiction book, Helping Children with Nonverbal Learning Disabilities to Flourish, and her personal essays have been cited as notable essays in Best American Essays 2016 and 2018. More at: http://www.marilynmartin.me or on Instagram at @marilynmartinzion.  7/29/13, 9/24/18