Lannan Foundation

Binyavanga Wainaina, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2007

Binyavanga Wainaina was born in Kenya in 1971. He is an author, journalist, and the founding editor of the literary magazine, Kwani?. In 2002 he won the prestigious Caine Prize for literature for his short story Discovering Home.  His writings have been featured in The EastAfrican, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times and The Guardian UK. He is presently a Writer-in-Residence at Union College in Schenectady, NY, where he is teaching, lecturing and working on a novel.

David Foster Wallace, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2000

David Foster Wallace is the author of the novel Infinite Jest; three short story collections, The Broom of the System, The Girl with Curious Hair, and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; and a collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Mr. Wallace, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1996, teaches at Illinois State University in Bloomington. Mr. Wallace worked on his new fiction during his residency.

“The whole trans-Pecos is haunted. Some of this is the high desert, where nothing has a shadow and stormclouds seem just out of reach. Some of it is the quiet, which is so profound it becomes its own hum. It is country that wants nothing from you, where it becomes impossible to take yourself seriously. A fruitful state to be in, work-wise, usually.”

Rosanna Warren, Poet - Marfa, Winter 2005

Rosanna Warren is a poet, writer, and educator.  She is the author of the poetry collections Departure, Stained Glass, Each Leaf Shines Separate, and Snow Day.  She currently teaches at Boston University as the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Joanna Weber, Curator - Marfa, Fall 2000

Joanna Weber is currently the acting curator of the Department of European and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Her exhibitions include Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, the late transition in 2000; Modernists: Robert Mangold, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin in 1998; and Photorealism: Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle, Robert Cottingham, Bruce Everett, Idelle Weber, Chuck Close and Sylvia Plimack Mangold in 1997.

During her residency, Ms. Weber worked on a book on Agnes Martin entitled Space for the Sacred.

Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, Activist, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2005

Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson is a member of the Haida Nation, from the village of Skidegate, Haida Gwaii. She has lectured and published on aboriginal law, particularly as it relates to cultural heritage, environmental protection, forestry, and has taught environmental law at the Centre for Indigenous-Environmental Research in Winnipeg, Manitoba. An accomplished singer and dancer, Ms. Williams-Davidson has a strong passion for cultural perpetuation and in 1978 co-founded the Skidegate Haida Dancers. She and her husband, artist Robert Davidson, attend and participate in potlatches and ceremonies, and often return to connect with the land and people of Haida Gwaii.

Christian Wiman, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2008

Christian Wiman is the author of two books of poetry, The Long Home (Story Line Press, 1998), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and most recently, Hard Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). His poems and essays appear widely in anthologies and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Slate, The Threepenny Review and The New Criterion. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Pushcart Prize and a Gerald Freund Grant from the Whiting Foundation. He is the editor of Poetry magazine and lives in Chicago.

C.D. Wright, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2003

C.D. Wright can be described in many ways: she is an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvents herself with each new volume.  Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

She has written ten volumes of poetry and recently published Cooling Time, a book comprised of poetry, memoir and essay.  In it she writes, “Many writers maintain a guarded border between language thick with hair and twigs and the reified, rarified stuff.  No matter which side of the border poets live on, they tend to act as if they were being overrun.  All I want is a day pass.  I like to sleep in my own bed.” A recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, Wright is a professor of English at Brown University.  With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers. 

I could hear the scales fall from my eyes when I walked into my Marfa study. Watching the birds dip in their bath and the breeze stirring the stippo grass--anything could come up. There isn’t a better place to face the light of the page, at least I have never been there.

Matthew Zapruder, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2007

Matthew Zapruder is the author of American Linden (Tupelo Press 2002), and of The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006). His poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Fence, Alaska Quarterly Review, Open City, Painted Bride Quarterly, Bomb, Jubilat, Harvard Review, The New Republic and The New Yorker. He teaches poetry in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New School, works as an Editor with Wave Books, and is co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series.