Lannan Foundation

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.

Thomas Joshua Cooper, Artist - Galisteo, Spring 2000

Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946, San Francisco) studied art, philosophy, and literature at Humbolt State University before completing his Masters of Art in Photography (graduating with honors) at the University of New Mexico in 1972. His first solo show was held in 1971, and since then, he has been the subject of over 85 solo exhibitions throughout the world.
Thomas Joshua Cooper has received numerous awards including a Photography Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978); a MacArthur Fellowship (1997); and, most recently, a John Simon Guggenheim Award (2009).
Thomas Joshua Cooper’s photographs can be found in over 50 public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Sam Wagstaff Collection, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; Nimes Museum of Contemporary Art, France; The Polaroid Collection, Frankfurt; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; The Tate Gallery, London; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Rose Mary Crawford, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2001

Rose Mary Crawford has written, directed, and produced numerous plays for children including “The Wicked Witch and the Tickle Monster,” “Never Say Never,” “The Mad King of Chalupa,” and “You Gotta Have a Dream.” She has also worked as an actor, journalist and poetry workshop instructor.

Ms. Crawford is co-proprietor with her husband, Stanley G. Crawford, of El Bosque Farm in Dixon, New Mexico.

Mary Crow, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2004

Poet Laureate of Colorado, Mary Crow is the author of nine books, five of her own poetry and four of translation.  Her books of poetry include I Have Tasted the Apple, Borders, and the chapbooks The High Cost of Living, The Business of Literature, and Going Home. Deeply engaged in the work of Latin and South American poets, she is the translator of Engravings Torn From Insomnia: Selected Poems by Olga Orozco; Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems by Roberto Juarroz; From The Country of Nevermore: poems by Jorge Teillier; and translator and editor of Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets. The latter won a Translation Award from Columbia University’s Translation Center.  She has read her poems in Israel and the former Yugoslavia and taught creative writing at Colorado State University for many years.

There are many things I could mention that contributed to my residency and that I am grateful for...All these things added up to an incredible sense of being valued as a writer and built an atmosphere that promoted creativity.

Lorin Cuoco, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2002

Lorin Cuoco, a former cultural reporter, founded the International Writers Center in St. Louis with William Gass. She was the editor of six books published by the IWC including The Writer in Politics, The Writer and Religion, Dual Muse: The Writer As Artist, The Artist As Writer, and Literary St. Louis, which she co-wrote with Gass.

John D'Agata, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2002

John D’Agata was born in 1974 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he holds MFAs in both nonfiction and poetry and is currently editor of lyric essays for Seneca Review.

He is the author of Halls of Fame, a book that journeys the endless corridors of America’s myriad halls of fame which Annie Dillard calls “A daring, utterly original book by a young writer of rare intelligence and artistry.” He is also the editor of a collection of essays entitled The Next American Essay, about which he says, “I want you preoccupied with art in this book, not with facts for the sake of facts.”

Lynn Davis, Artist - Galisteo, Spring 2000

Lynn Davis was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1944. Her work is in numerous international public and private collections, including The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1997 the Lannan Foundation gifted a large group of Ms. Davis’s series of iceberg photographs to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Ms. Davis has become known for her large-scale black and white photographs. She has produced images made in Egypt, Australia, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen, Lebanon, Greenland, and the United States.

While in residence at Lannan, Ms. Davis traveled throughout the Southwest completing the second half of a new two-part project comprised of photographs taken within the United States.

Matthew Dickman, Poet - Marfa, Winter 2010

Matthew Dickman’s debut collection of poetry, All American Poem, won the 2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Tony Hoagland, and the 2009 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry (Oregon Book Awards).  His work has been published in Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, Poet Lore, www.fishousepoems.org, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and/or residencies from Oregon Literary Arts, the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Work Center.  He lives in Portland, OR.

Linh Dinh, Writer, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2006

Linh Dinh is the author of Fake House, where we meet American and Vietnamese characters such as a white man considering ordering an Asian mail-order bride; a Vietnamese man wondering why more young women in his village don’t accept money to marry foreigners; and a white woman who believes she’s the ugliest female in the world. His second volume of stories, Blood and Soap, was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. Dinh has also authored four books of poetry including Jam Alerts, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, and Borderless Bodies. He is also the editor of the anthology Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam.

Rikki Ducornet, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2004

Rikki Ducornet, a cosmopolitan and intellectual artist, has lived in North Africa, South America, France, and Canada. Of her most recent book, Gazelle, the Washington Post writes, “[It] is a sensuous book. A mix of smells pervades its pages, from orange blossoms, perfumes, mint, almonds, limes, roses, jasmine, and long-simmered delicacies to animal dung, vinegar, urine, and long-buried mummies. Great stand-alone sentences are enough to make one’s mouth water.”

Marfa is wonderfully still --but for the sound of its trains (and I really liked that)--it is also riotous with creatures. And because wild things have always been the powers that animate my imagination, I wrote well there. After gazing at the spiders and the birds, and taking in that big sky, a number of characters dropped by—and I could hear their voices distinctly, it was so quiet!-- and was seized by an unexpected book!