BREAD LOAF FELLOWS 2009
Paul Austin—Bernard de Voto Fellow in Nonfiction
Paul Austin is the author of Something for the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER. His essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Southeast Review, and Gettysburg Review. A former firefighter, he has more than twenty years of experience working in emergency rooms. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
David Barber—Robert Frost/Middlebury College Writer-in-Residence
David Barber is poetry editor of Atlantic Monthly, where he has been on staff since 1994. The author of two collections of poems, Wonder Cabinet and The Spirit Level, he has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and PEN New England. His poetry and criticism have appeared in a wide array of publications, including the Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, and Parnassus. He will be the Robert Frost Writer-in-Residence at Middlebury College for the 2009-2010 academic year.
Charles Bardes—Bernard de Voto Fellow in Nonfiction
Charles Bardes is a physician who practices and teaches general medicine in New York City. His recent book Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia, is a cultural history of a disease construct. Excerpts from The Double Serpent: Subtexts in Medicine have appeared in the print and on-line editions of Agni. His essay, “The Doctor in Middle Age,” is included in Becoming a Doctor, forthcoming from Creative Nonfiction.
Stephanie Brown—Margaret Bridgman Fellow in Poetry
Stephanie Brown is the author of two books of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Slope, Pool, ZYZZYVA, LIT, and Yellow Silk , in addition to four editions of Best American Poetry. Her poetry and essays have been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation; Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present; The Grand Permission: New Writing about Motherhood and Poetics; and others. In 2001, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at the University of California, Irvine, and at the University of Redlands but has primarily made her living as a librarian and library manager.
Peter Campion—Theodore Morrison Fellow in Poetry
Peter Campion is the author of two collections of poetry, Other People and The Lions. His poems and prose have appeared recently in ArtNews, Boston Globe, Modern Painters, Poetry, New Republic, Slate, and Yale Review. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Civitella Ranieri Individual Artist’s Fellowship, and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Auburn University and edits the journal Literary Imagination.
Jaed Coffin—William Sloane Fellow in Nonfiction
Jaed Coffin is the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, a memoir about his time as a Buddhist monk spent in his mother's native village of Panomsarakram, Thailand. As a 2008 resident fellow of The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, Coffin began Roughhouse Friday, a novel based on the year he fought as the middleweight champion of an Alaskan barroom boxing circuit. Coffin is the recipient of a Maine Literary Award and a Wilson Fellowship from Deerfield Academy. From Brunswick, Maine, he teaches at University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing.
Matthew Dickman—Margaret Bridgman Fellow in Poetry
Matthew Dickman is the author of All American Poem, winner of the 2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including New Yorker, Tin House, and Lyric; and he is the recipient of fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Alex Espinoza—Margaret Bridgman Fellow in Fiction
Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico to parents from Michoacan, and he was raised in suburban Los Angeles. His first novel, Still Water Saints, appeared simultaneously in English and Spanish and was a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection. His nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Salon. He currently teaches English and creative writing at Fresno State and is at work on his second novel.
Vicki Forman—Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Nonfiction
Vicki Forman is the author of This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, chosen by Tom Bissell for the 2008 Bakeless Prize in nonfiction. Forman’s work has appeared in Seneca Review and Santa Monica Review as well as the anthologies, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs; This Day: Dairies From American Women; and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and lives outside Los Angeles with her husband and two children.
Lisa Fugard—Alan Collins Fellow in Fiction
Lisa Fugard was born in South Africa and moved to New York City when she was 18. Skinner’s Drift, her first novel, was named a notable book of 2006 by the New York Times, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the runner-up for the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her short fiction has been published in Story, Outside, and other literary magazines. Her many travel articles have been published in the New York Times. She now lives in Southern California.
Doreen Gildroy—Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry
Doreen Gildroy is the author of The Little Field of Self (winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares) and Human Love. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slate, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She currently is writing a column for American Poetry Review entitled “Poetry and Mysticism.” In 2009 she will be a visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Irvine, California, with her husband and daughter.
Lauren Groff—John Farrar Fellow in Fiction
Lauren Groff's first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, was a New York Times and Booksense bestseller and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Stories from her collection, Delicate Edible Birds, have been published in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and One Story, among other journals and anthologies. She has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Yaddo, Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, and the University of Louisville, where she was an Axton Fellow in Fiction. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
James Allen Hall—John Ciardi Fellow in Poetry
James Allen Hall is the author of Now You're The Enemy, selected for the 2008 Arkansas Poetry Prize, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. His poems and personal essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Boston Review, American Letters and Commentary, Redivider, and other journals. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, residencies at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and two Donald Barthelme Awards from Inprint, Inc. A graduate of the PhD program at the University of Houston, Hall currently teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York, Potsdam.
Myronn Hardy—Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry
Myronn Hardy is the author of two books of poetry, Approaching the Center, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and The Headless Saints. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, FIELD, Indiana Review, Tampa Review, Phoebe, aspeers (Germany), Versal (Amsterdam), Callaloo, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Annenberg Foundation, Djerassi, Cave Canem, Instituto Sacatar, and Fundación Valparaiso. He lives in New York City where he’s completing a novel.
Leslie Harrison— Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry
Leslie Harrison’s Displacement was chosen by Eavan Boland for the 2008 Bakeless Prize in poetry. Harrison received an MA from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She was born in Germany and now resides in western Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New Republic, Memorious, Barn Owl Review, Southwest Review, Orion, and elsewhere. She is a writing teacher and the production manager for a weekly newspaper and lives with her two dogs in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.
Skip Horack—Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Fiction
Skip Horack is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His short story collection, The Southern Cross, was chosen by Antonya Nelson for the 2008 Bakeless Prize in fiction. His fiction has appeared in Southeast Review, New Delta Review, Louisiana Literature, Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, Epoch, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently a lecturer at Stanford.
Aryn Kyle—Jane Tinkham Broughton Fellowship in Fiction
Aryn Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals, was a national bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. Aryn’s short fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, Best New American Voices, 2005, Best American Short Stories, 2007, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Association Award, a Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers’ Association Award, and a National Magazine Award in fiction. Her short story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me, will be published in April 2010.
Kirsten Menger-Anderson—Fletcher Pratt Fellow in Fiction
Kirsten Menger-Anderson is the author of Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Maryland Review, Post Road, and Wascana Review, among other publications and have been shortlisted for the Andre Dubus Award, the Richard Yates Award, the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, and the Iowa Review story contest. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and child.
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés—Theodore Morrison Fellow in Fiction
Born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’s first collection of short fiction is Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles. She earned a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, where she studied with Isaac Singer, and a DA in English at State University of New York--Albany, where Toni Morrison was her professor. Recent publications of prose and poetry appear in Damselfly Press, Pearl, and SNReview. She teaches Latino/a literature and writing at University of Central Florida in Orlando, where she lives with her family.
Paul Otremba—Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry
Paul Otremba is the author of the poetry collection The Currency. His poems and criticism have appeared in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Washington Post, Poetry Daily, Tikkun, and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics. He has won scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship, a Krakow Poetry Seminar Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Houston, Texas.
Frances
de Pontes Peebles—John Gardner Fellow in Fiction
Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of The Seamstress. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received several awards including Brazil’s Sacatar Artist’s Fellowship and the Michener Copernicus Society of America Award. Her short stories have appeared in Indiana Review, Missouri Review, and the O. Henry Prize Story Collection 2005.
Salvatore Scibona—Jane Tinkham Broughton Fellowship in Fiction
Salvatore Scibona’s first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and was the winner of both the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award. The End will be published in German and French in 2010. Scibona’s short fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and Best New American Voices. He teaches at Harvard Summer School and administers the writing fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Josh Weil—Jane Tinkham Broughton Fellow in Fiction
Josh Weil is the author of the novella collection The New Valley. He has published fiction in Granta, New England Review, and Narrative; and nonfiction in New York Times and Poets & Writers. Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, and the Dana Award in Portfolio. As the 2009 Tickner Fellow, he will be the writer-in-residence at Gilman School in Baltimore.
C. Dale Young—Amanda Davis Returning Fellow
C. Dale Young is the author of three books of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day, The Second Person, a finalist for both the Northern California Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and TORN, forthcoming in early 2012. He practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for the New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has been a recipient of the Grolier Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, the Stanley P. Young Fellowship from Bread Loaf, as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in San Francisco.
BREAD LOAF TUITION SCHOLARS 2009
James Arthur—Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Poetry
James Arthur's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Southern Review, and Shenandoah. He has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and a Stegner Fellowship, as well as fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, fiction writer Shannon Robinson.
Kara Candito—John Ciardi Scholar in Poetry
Kara Candito’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2007. She has received an Edward H. & Marie C. Kingsbury Fellowship and a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her forthcoming book, Taste of Cherry, won the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize.
Rebecca Cook—Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Fiction
Rebecca Cook writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and has published in literary journals such as New England Review, Northwest Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Humanities Review, Orchid, Wicked Alice, and Story South. She published a chapbook of poems, The Terrible Baby, in March 2006, has recently completed a book of essays, Squeeze, and is currently at work on her first novel. She teaches creative writing and literature of the humanities at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.
Eduardo C. Corral—Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Poetry
Eduardo C. Corral's poems have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Post Road, and Quarterly West. He has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Award and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has been the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University and the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University.
Heidi W. Durrow—Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Fiction
Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. She has worked as a litigator and has taught Life Skills to professional athletes. Co-host of the podcast, Mixed Chicks Chat, she is a co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and PMS poemmemoirstory. Her awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an American Scandinavian Foundation Grant. As the winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change, her first novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, will be published in February of 2010.
Alan Heathcock—Carol Houck Smith Scholar in Fiction
Alan Heathcock's fiction has recently appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His awards include a National Magazine Award for fiction. A native of Chicago he teaches fiction writing at Boise State University in Idaho.
Dave Lucas—Carol Houck Smith Scholar in Poetry
Dave Lucas received a 2005 “Discovery”/The Nation Award. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and Threepenny Review, and he reviews poetry for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is a doctoral student in English at the University of Michigan.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett—Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction
Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in Carmel, California, to a Japanese mother and American father. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her essay, “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium,” originally published in Agni 65, was given a “notable” citation in the 2008 Best American Essays and will be anthologized in Creative Nonfiction 3. Her debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, will be published in the fall of 2009.
Tomás Q. Morín—Theodore Morrison Scholar in Poetry
Tomás Q. Morín is a Texas native whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Blackbird, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets 2007, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He has been awarded scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Idyllwild Arts Academy. He holds an MA in Hispanic and Italian Studies from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from Texas State Univeristy, where he is a senior lecturer in English.
Celeste Ng—Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Fiction
Celeste Ng holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Subtropics, and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best New American Voices. She has taught writing at the University of Michigan and Grub Street and is a frequent contributor to the website Fiction Writers Review. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Elena Passarello—Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction
Elena Passarello is an actor and writer currently developing a collection of essays on the human voice in performance. Her nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Slate, Ninth Letter, Superstition Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and the anthology Pittsburgh in Words. Elena is a graduate of the University of Iowa's nonfiction MFA program, where she won an Iowa Museum of Art Writer-In-Residence Fellowship. She now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is a visiting professor of writing at Grand Valley State University.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez—Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction
Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s fiction and essays have appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009, Kenyon Review, African American Review, PMS poemmemoirstory, North Carolina Literary Review, Richard Wright Newsletter, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. Born and raised in Memphis, a graduate of Harvard, and a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dolen currently lives in the Pacific Northwest where she teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound.
Jim Ruland—James Kilgo Scholar in Nonfiction
Jim Ruland’s stories and essays have appeared in Believer, Black Warrior Review, Esquire, Hobart, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, Salt Flats Annual, and San Diego City Beat. He is a veteran of the Navy; a columnist for Razorcake, America’s only non-profit punk rock zine; and the host of the LA-based reading series Vermin on the Mount. He is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the NEA and the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome. He lives in Southern California with his wife, the visual artist Nuvia Crisol Guerra.
Hasanthika Sirisena—Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction
Hasanthika Sirisena was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Witness, Best New American Voices, and other publications. In 2008 she received a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. She currently shuttles back and forth between Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Sasha West—Louis Untermeyer Scholar in Poetry
Sasha West’s poetry and reviews have appeared in Ninth Letter, American Poet, Margie, Born, Chelsea, American Letters & Commentary, Callaloo, Third Coast, Forklift OH, and elsewhere. She holds graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston, where she was awarded the Verlaine Prize for her dissertation. She was editor of Gulf Coast for three years and now serves as board president. She teaches creative writing at Rice University.