Past Residents
Chris Abani, Poet, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2004
Chris Abani's novels are GraceLand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections include Dog Woman (Red Hen, Fall 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001).
He teaches in the MFA Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. A Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern California, he is the recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Award and a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship.
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Zaia Alexander, Writer, Translator - Marfa, Spring 2008
Zaia Alexander is an author and literary translator living in Los Angeles and Berlin. Her publications include Wende Kids: A New Generation of German Authors, “Primo Levi and Translation” in the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, “The Translator’s Diary” in Suitcase: A Journal for Transcultural Traffic, and “The Danube Exodus: the Rippling Currents of the River” (coauthored with Marsha Kinder) in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (MIT). Her most recent translations include the novel Snowed Under by Antje Rávic Strubel (Red Hen Press) and a selection of short stories which have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literature from UCLA, and was formerly Director of Programs at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades. In 2007, she served as Chair of the PEN Center Translation Jury.
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Benjamin Anastas, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2006
Benjamin Anastas is the author of two novels, An Underachiever’s Diary (1998, Dial Press) and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance (FSG, 2001), which was named among the year’s Notable Books in The New York Times. His novella Versace Enthroned with Saints Margaret, Jerome, Alex and the Angel Donatella appeared in The Yale Review and was awarded the magazine’s Smart Family Foundation Prize for fiction in 2005. 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.
Marfa is a remarkable place for any number of reasons, but I will always remember it as the green garden on the horizon that I pedaled towards on an old blue bike while my head rang with sentences and paragraphs I had yet to write down. I arrived with approximately 15 pages of text and a few more pages of notes. I left with the first half of the novel written and a very clear idea of where the rest of the book needs to go. For this I give thanks to the Inca Doves, and the hummingbirds, and the trains that seemed ways to whistle their arrival…
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Talvikki Ansel, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2006
Talvikki Ansel is the author of Jetty (Zoo Press, 2003), and My Shining Archipelago, chosen as a winner by James Dickey for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1996. Of her work James Dickey has said, “She renders the heat, the closeness, the mystery, and the terrible fear of the undisclosed, the lurking, the waiting to happen. This is true imagination, true craft.” Her poems have appeared in the anthologies New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University, 2000) and The Pushcart Prize XXVI, and in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic. She lives in Rhode Island.
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Michael Ashkin, Artist - Marfa, Spring 2001
Michael Ashkin was born in Morristown, NY, in 1955, and was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago. He began painting when he was 30, following an academic background in Arabic and Hebrew languages, and multiple jobs in teaching, computer programming, and investment banking.
Mr. Ashkin’s work has been shown at such New York galleries as Leo Castelli, Exit Art, and White Columns, as well as at venues in Chicago and California. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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John Balaban, Poet and Writer - Marfa, Spring 2002
John Balaban is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, a translator of Vietnamese poetry, and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
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Dan Beachy-Quick, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2005
Dan Beachy-Quick received his MFA at the University of Iowa, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of two books, North True South Bright, named one of Fence magazine’s Best Books by Emerging Writers fall 2003; and Spell, a book-length reverie on Moby Dick. His poems have appeared widely.
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Daphne Beal, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2000
Daphne Beal was educated at Brown and New York universities. A former editor of the New Yorker, she has also done editorial work for Artforum and The Chinati Foundation’s publication Art and the Landscape.
She has received fellowships from The New York Times, the Vermont Studio Center, and was given honorable mention from the O. Henry Short Story Prize in 1997.
During her residency Ms. Beal worked on her novel that explores the expatriate Buddhist community in Kathmandu and young Nepali women working in the red-light area of Bombay.
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Peter Behrens, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2008
Peter Behrens, a native of Montreal, is the author of one novel, The Law of Dreams, which was nominated for the 2008 International Impac Literature Prize. His collection of short stories, Night Driving, was published in 1987. Stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Brick, Best Canadian Stories (twice), Best Canadian Essays, The Atlantic Monthly, and many anthologies. He held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, and was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He lives in Maine.
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Susan Bernofsky, Translator - Marfa, Fall 2008
Susan Bernofsky is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe and the translator of a dozen books of literary fiction including The Assistant by Robert Walser and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. She is currently at work on a biography of Robert Walser.
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Sherwin Bitsui, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2005
Sherwin Bitsui is Dine of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and more recently, the 2002 University of Arizona Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Award. His first book, Shapeshift, is available from the University of Arizona Press. Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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Max Blumenthal, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2008
Max Blumenthal is a Nation Institute writing fellow and a research fellow for Media Matters for America. His work appears regularly in The Nation, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, Salon, and Alternet. Dozens of nationally broadcast television and radio programs have sought his insights including CNN’s Weekend Edition, MSNBC’s Countdown, Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera English, and PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal. Blumenthal’s investigative reporting on the serial femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico won the Online Journalism Association/USC Annenberg’s Best Independent Feature award in 2003. His investigative video reports have been seen by millions of online viewers and rebroadcast by networks from the United States to Russia.
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Charles Bowden, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2001
Charles Bowden is the author of eleven books including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Dog; Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future; Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America; Desierto: Memories of the Future; Red Line; Blue Desert; and (with Michael Binstein) Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions.
He is a contributing editor of Esquire, and also writes for other magazines such as Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review, as well as for newspapers. Winner of the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.
“I wrote [A Shadow in the City] in Marfa, Texas, in a house loaned to me by a foundation as part of their writers’ program. This is the second book I have written in that house thanks to the kindness of the outfit. So I would like to thank the folks at the Lannan Foundation. And issue an apology to the town of Marfa for once again being a hermit in their midst and remaining largely ignorant of their fine community. It seems when one is blessed with the loan of a Lannan house, one enters and hardly ever leaves the walls again. I did see things out my window that make me wish this were not my fate. The Davis Mountains and Big Bend region of Texas are good earth. Well, better than good.”
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Pamela D. Bridgewater, Writer, Activist - Marfa, Spring 2008
Pamela D. Bridgewater is a lawyer, reproductive rights advocate, activist, and the author of Breeding A Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom (South End Press). She has been involved in the women’s health movement for many years providing legal defense of reproductive health care clinics, service providers and activists, and also provides pro bono legal service and consultation on matters such as estate planning for poor people and people living with HIV/AIDS, as well as legal services for peace activists and activists within the fair trade and globalization movements. Her work in the area of reproduction, sexuality, identity, poverty and women’s health care has led her to work with leading legal scholars, policymakers, activists and advocates from North America, Europe, Latin America and South Africa. As Professor of Law at American University, she teaches property law, inheritance law, and reproduction and the law.
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Mary Caponegro, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2006
Mary Caponegro is the author of the short story collections Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts, and The Complexities of Intimacy. She is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor of Writing and Literature at Bard College. William Gass said of her work, “The music of Mary Caponegro’s stories is to the mouth what wine is. Readers will find themselves lost among answers, intoxicated, knowing only that these are stories unlike any others before or since, which is, for this reader at least, a relief, a challenge, and a godsend.”
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Cyrus Cassells, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2008
Cyrus Cassells is the author of four books of poetry, including his most recent collection, More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Lambda Literary Award. He is a tenured associate professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos.
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Thomas Centolella, Poet - Galisteo, Spring 2000
Thomas Centolella is the author of several books of poetry including Terra Firma, selected by Denise Levertov for the 1990 National Poetry Series, and Lights & Mysteries, which received the 1996 Poetry Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. In 1992 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Mr. Centolella was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the College of Marin California, and in the California Poets in the Schools Program. He is currently living in San Francisco. He has just completed his third book of poetry.
During his residency Mr. Centolella worked on new poems and some short prose pieces and gave a public reading at Downtown Subscription in Santa Fe.
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Denise Chavez, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2000
Denise Chavez is a novelist, playwright, actress, director, and teacher. A native of Las Cruces, New Mexico, Ms. Chavez still lives in the house where she was raised. A recipient of the 1995 Governor’s Award in Literature, her books include Face of an Angel and The Last of the Menu Girls. During her residency, Ms. Chavez worked on a novel entitled The King and Queen of Comezon that addresses the complex issues of the Mexican-American border.
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Marilyn Chin, Poet - Marfa, Winter 2003
Marilyn Chin is the author of The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, winner of the PEN Josephine Miles Award; Dwarf Bamboo; and, most recently, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. She is currently on the faculty of the M.F.A. program at San Diego State University.
“The breathtaking, expansive desert landscape cleared my brain of excess baggage; and the gift of time gave me the freedom to not only write but to reassess my life. The night sky of Marfa is so huge that one can’t help but to transgress the borders of one’s own limited imagination. I believe that I wrote some of my best work here.”
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Killarney Clary, Poet - Marfa, Spring 1998
Killarney Clary, who received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1992, has published two books of poetry, Who Whispered Near Me, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and By Common Salt.
In a review of Who Whispered Near Me, Gary Young wrote, “There is no glamour here, little drama. Her subjects are prosaic, but her prose captures the internal rhythms of both memory and casual speech, and has been wrenched into a fierce lyricism. Clary’s poetry is a gymnastic of mind. We may feel submerged, lost in someone else’s thought, but her poems are maps, and Clary leads us surely through a maze we discover is nothing less than the rich pattern of a life.”
Ms. Clary was born in Los Angles in 1954, and was educated at the University of California at Irvine, where she received degrees in studio art and poetry writing. She has taught at the University of California at Irvine and at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
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Dennis Cooper"Guide"
September 04, 1997
With an aesthetic reflective of hallucinogenic disorientation and the sensory overload of rock and roll, Dennis Cooper talks about the transformation of chaos into art.
From Bookworm Interviews