Past Residents
Richard Shelton, Writer and Poet - Marfa, Summer 2000
Born in Boise, Idaho in 1933, Richard Shelton has published three volumes of poetry, The Tattooed Desert, All The Dirty Words, and Desert Water, as well as a memoir, Going Back To Bisbee.
Mr. Shelton teaches at the University of Arizona at Tucson and directs a creative writing workshop at the Santa Rita Unit of the Arizona State Prison. Mr. Shelton, who was particularly interested in the topography, flora, fauna, and history of the Davis and Chisos Mountains in Texas, worked on his poetry during his residency.
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Matthew Shenoda, Poet, Activist, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2005
Matthew Shenoda is a Coptic poet, educator, and activist devoted to using art for social change and to build community amongst people of color. His poems and writings have appeared widely and he is a regular contributor to Voices of the Middle East and North Africa on KPFA Pacifica radio. He is currently editing To This Revolution We Will Rise: A Global Anthology of Poetry forthcoming from Third World Press, and his debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else, is available from Coffee House Press. He is currently a faculty member in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and lives in South Berkeley, California.
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Kate Shepherd, Artist - Santa Fe, Winter 1999
Kate Shepherd works in a range of disciplines including drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking. In her work, Ms. Shepherd explores the elegance of form in common, everyday structures such as cartons, tents, windows and trays reduced to their most elementary outlines. Minimal in her approach, her work articulates relationships that create tension between figure and ground, line and color.
Ms. Shepherd participated in a long residency in Santa Fe. During her seven-week tenure, she completed a series of drawings and paintings which were installed in the foundation’s gallery and presented to the public. Ms. Shepherd also gave a lecture on the development of her work at SITE Santa Fe. The exhibition was also presented in Los Angeles, at Otis Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, in Winter 2000.
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Jeremy Sigler, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2006
Jeremy Sigler is the author of two books of poetry, To and To (1998) and Mallet Eyes (2000), both published by Left Hand Books. His next book, Crackpot Poet, is forthcoming from Black Square. Sigler is Associate New York Editor of Parkett and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He received his MFA in sculpture from UCLA in 1996, and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Richard Siken, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2007
Richard Siken’s poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Indiana Review and Forklift, Ohio, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2000 and Legitimate Dangers. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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Andrea Smith, Writer, Activist - Marfa, Summer 2006
Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. A long-time anti-violence and Native American activist and scholar, she is co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization that utilizes direct action and critical dialogue, and has published widely on issues of violence against women of color. She is currently an assistant professor in the Native American Studies department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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Alison Smith, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2008
Alison Smith’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, The London Telegraph, The New York Times, The Believer, Glamour, Best American Erotica, and other publications. She is the author of one book, a memoir titled Name All the Animals, and has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Judy Grahn Prize for Nonfiction and a Lambda Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA writing program at Goddard College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Patricia Smith, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2008
Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a book of poems chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection, winner of the 2007 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. Teahouse was also voted the Best Poetry Book of 2006 by About.com. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals. She is also the author of the groundbreaking history Africans in America and the children’s book Janna and the Kings, winner of a Lee & Low Books New Voices Award. In addition, she is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. In 2006, during a ceremony at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center of Chicago State University, she was voted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Currently, Smith is working on the young adult novel The Journey of Willie J, a verse memoir and a Blood Dazzler collaboration with Urban Bush Women choreographer Paloma McGregor.
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Lee Stringer, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2005
Lee Stringer lived on the streets from the early eighties until the mid-nineties. He is a former editor and columnist of Street News. Called “the new Jack London” by Kurt Vonnegut, he is the author of the short story collections Sleepaway School and Grand Central Winter. His essays and articles have appeared in a variety of other publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Newsday. He lives in Mamaroneck, New York.
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Karen Swenson, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2002
Karen Swenson, travel and political writer for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is the author of the National Poetry Series-winning book The Landlady in Bangkok.
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Melanie Rae Thon, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2005
Melanie Rae Thon is the author of the novels Sweet Hearts, Iona Moon and Meteors in August, and the short story collections First, Body and Girls in the Grass. In 1996 she was selected one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She is currently Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.
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Le Thi Diem Thuy, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2001
Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s prose and poetry have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harper’s Magazine, and The Best American Essays of 1997. Her solo performance work, Red Fiery Summer, and the bodies between us, have been presented at the International Women Playwright’s Festival in Galway, Ireland, and the New World Theater at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently working on a book of prose entitled The Gangster We Are All Looking For.
“In Marfa, I was able to enter deeply into the world of my work which inevitably returned me to the world of my life. As I worked, everyone I lost this year made their way to me in Marfa.. This was significant, as so much of my work is concerned with the presence of the dead in the lives of the living.”
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Barbara Tran, Poet and Writer - Marfa, Winter 2003
Barbara Tran’s first poetry collection, In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, was selected as the winner of Tupelo Press’s chapbook competition, and as a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.
Coeditor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, Barbara is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Gerald Freund Fellowship, an Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. During her residency in Marfa, Barbara worked on new poems and a primarily prose, book-length narrative.
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Quincy Troupe, Poet, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2004
Quincy Troupe, born in 1943 in New York City, is a poet, performer, editor, and two-time winner of the prestigious Heavyweight-Champion of Poetry sponsored by The World Poetry Bout of Taos.
He has received two American Book Awards: in 1980 for his collection of poetry, Snake-Back Solos and in 1989 for his non-fiction book, Miles: The Autobiography, which he co-wrote with jazz legend Miles Davis.
Troupe has been a featured poet on two PBS television series on poetry: The United States of Poetry and the Bill Moyers’ special, The Power of the Word.
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Monique Truong, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2001
Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property.
Truong coedited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, and her essay “Welcome to America” was featured on National Public Radio. Granting her an award of excellence, the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University called her “a pioneer in the field, as an academic, an advocate, and an artist.”
Truong’s debut novel, The Book of Salt, imagines the life of a young Vietnamese man who works as a live-in cook in the Paris home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
“A writing residency is always a gift of time. The Lannan Residency, though, provided much more than that—solitude in the best sense of the word, the West Texas sky painted fresh each day, and the Chihuahua desert, a landscape that changes every time you blink.”
“A writing residency is always a gift of time. The Lannan Residency, though, provided much more than that—solitude in the best sense of the word, the West Texas sky painted fresh each day, and the Chihuahua desert, a landscape that changes every time you blink.”
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Mark Turcotte, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2004
Poet Mark Turcotte spent his earliest years on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation and in the migrant camps of western United States. He has published four volumes of poetry, including Exploding Chippewas, and his work, four times nominated for Pushcart Prizes, has appeared widely in such publications as Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and Poetry. Turcotte won the first Gwendolyn Brooks Open-Mic Poetry Award in 1993 and received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2001. Of his work Louise Erdrich says, “Mark Turcotte’s work is powered by anger, hilarity, and an earthy tenderness that grabs the heart and won’t let go.” He currently lives in Michigan.
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Brian Turner, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2008
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology. Here, Bullet is a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq war featuring poems that reflect Turner’s experiences as a soldier. The poems speak with compassion, sympathy, and horror of the first-hand experience of war and with immediacy of loss, beauty, comradeship, and longing for home and the familiar; he deplores the violence and acknowledges the grief and terror of war.
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Judy Tuwaletstiwa, Artist and Writer - Marfa, Fall 2000
Judy Tuwaletstiwa lives and works on the Hopi reservation in Kykotsmovi, Arizona. Her artwork has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions during the last 25 years. She has also taught poetry workshops throughout the United States and has received three artist-in-residence grants from the California State Arts Council.
While in residence, she worked on a book project that involved reviewing her 30 years of writing, journals, and images.
“What a gift: a light-filled, beautiful house, a welcoming town, a landscape that invites the spirit to expand, uninterrupted time to float in the waters of the unconscious, meaningful exchanges with other writers and artists. Nurtured in the generosity of the Lannan Residency, I began my book, Making Breath Visible.”
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Don Usner, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2000
During his three-week residency, Don Usner worked on a book documenting the cultural life of Chimayó, New Mexico. In his final report to the foundation he stated that “…rather than a simple recounting of facts or a catalogue of elements of place, I felt compelled to create semi-fictional vignettes. To produce them, I had to stretch my writing and imagining abilities in ways that I hadn’t anticipated.”
This forthcoming work will be published in both English and Spanish. When he is not writing, Mr. Usner works as a professional photographer. He lives in Chimayó, New Mexico.
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Jean Valentine, Writer and Poet - Marfa, Fall 2000
Jean Valentine was born in 1934 and graduated from Radcliff in 1956. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1964 for her first book, Dream Barker. Her other books include Pilgrims; Ordinary Thing; The Messenger; Growing Darkness, Growing Light; and The Cradle of the Real Life.
She has received both NEA and Guggenheim grants. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence. While in residence, she worked on her next volume of poems.
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Linda Norton, formerly the poetry editor at the University of California Press, is an editor at Five Fingers Review and has published her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in North American Review, Breukelen, Northwest Review, and many other journals.
From Past Residents