Lannan Foundation

Martha Collins, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2003

Martha Collins is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow Press); her book-length poem Blue Front is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2006. She is also co-translator of two collections of poems from the Vietnamese: The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (UMass) and Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da from Curbstone Press.

She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, and three Pushcart Prizes.  She is currently a Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and English at Oberlin College.

Stanley G. Crawford, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2001

Stanley G. Crawford was born in 1937 and was educated at the University of Chicago and at the Sorbonne. He is the author of three novels: Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, Travel Notes, Gascoyne, and Some Instructions, a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced.

He is also the author of two memoirs: A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small Farm in New Mexico and Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico. He has written numerous articles in various publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Double Take and Country Living.

Mr. Crawford is co-proprietor with his wife, Rose Mary Crawford, of El Bosque Farm in Dixon, New Mexico.

Robert Creeley, Poet, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2005

Robert Creeley, poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1926. He entered Harvard University in 1943, leaving after one year to drive an ambulance in India and Burma during World War II.

During the 1950s, after dropping out of Harvard, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was an editor of its innovative literary journal, the Black Mountain Review.

Ann Cummins, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2003

Born in the southern Rocky Mountain town of Durango, Colorado, Ann Cummins writes frequently about working class people. During the early part of the 20th century, her family migrated from County Galway, Ireland, to Colorado, where they mined silver, coal, and uranium.

When Cummins was nine, her father—a uranium mill worker—moved the family to Shiprock, New Mexico, in the northern part of the Navajo Indian Reservation, where Ann graduated from high school. Although her work extends beyond her ties to the southwest, she is often drawn by landscape and custom to write about the region of her birth.

A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs, Ann Cummins has published stories in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories, 2002, among numerous other publications.

The recipient of a Lannan fellowship, she divides her time between Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband, musician S. E. Willis, and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Averill Curdy, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2007

Averill Curdy received her MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The New England Review, 32 Poems, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and others. She is the recipient of a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Illinois Council for the Arts. She lives in Chicago and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

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 Dillon, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2006

Matthew Dillon is the founder and Executive Director of Seed Alliance, a public charity supporting the ethical stewardship and development of seed. In addition to writing on seed issues Dillon writes fiction, poetry and country-punk ballads. While at Marfa he will work on a novel, Consider the Sky, as well as series of essays on the history of plant breeding.

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!

Deborah Eisenberg, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2001

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of five collections of short stories, All Around Atlantis, The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg, Under the 82nd Airborne, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, and the most recent, Twilight of the Super Heroes: Stories. Eisenberg is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2003, a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. 

Laura Flanders, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2006

Laura Flanders is the host of RadioNation on Air America.
She is the author of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians and the bestselling book BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species, an investigation into the women in George W. Bush’s Cabinet, described as “fierce, funny and intelligent” by Publisher’s Weekly.  She writes regularly for the Nation, Alternet, Ms. Magazine, Znet and others, and is a frequent panelist on television news programs including “Fox News Watch,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity & Colmes,” CSPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and others.  She also founded Women’s Desk at the media watch group, FAIR, and for more than ten years she produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR’s nationally-syndicated radio program.