Administrative Staff

Michael Collier, director of the Conference, has published six books of poems, including The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, most recently, An Individual History. With Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, he edited A William Maxwell Portrait. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Foundation and Thomas Watson Foundation fellowships, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004, he teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland.

Jennifer Grotz, assistant director of the Conference, is the author of The Needle. Her first book, Cusp, received the Katharine Nason Bakeless Prize and the Natalie Ornish Best First Book of Poetry Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her translations from the French of the poems of Patrice de La Tour du Pin are collected in Psalms of All My Days, forthcoming in 2013. Her poems, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared widely in journals such as Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. A recipient of awards from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation, she teaches at the University of Rochester.

Noreen Cargill, administrative manager of the Conference, has worked for Middlebury College since 2000. Before joining the Conference, she worked in a library, a bookstore, and a small publishing house.  She enjoys freelance writing and has published in Better Homes and Gardens, the Boston Globe, Vermont Life, and Vermont Magazine.