Past Residents
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Xue Di, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2007
Xue Di is a native of Beijing. After taking part in the 1989 demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square, he left China and, since 1990, has been a fellow in Brown University’s “Freedom to Write” program. Among his works are three books of poetry in Chinese: Hui Yi (Remembering), Chan Li (Trembling), and Meng Yi (Dream Talk), and five books in English translation: Heart into Soil, Circumstances, An Ordinary Day, Another Kind of Tenderness, and Zone. His poetry has also appeared in American Letters & Commentary, AGNI, Lit, Poetry International, The Drunken Boat, and Parthenon West Review.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Geoff Dyer, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2004
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. His many books include But Beautiful, (winner of a Somerset Maugham Prize), Paris Trance, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and most recently, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It. He lives in London where he spends much of his time wishing he lived in San Francisco.
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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.
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B. H. Fairchild, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2005
B. H. Fairchild’s poetry has appeared in The Paris Reveiw, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. He grew up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. His books include The Arrival of the Future, The Art of the Lathe, and most recently, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems. He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Lannan Foundations, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
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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.
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William L. Fox, Poet and Writer - Marfa, Fall 2002
William L. Fox is the author of six nonfiction books on the cultural geography of the American Southwest, more than a dozen books of poetry, and is currently at work on a book about scientific and artistic images of the Antarctic.
His poems have appeared in more than 60 magazines and journals, and he edited the West Coast Poetry Review for many years. He is the Western States Arts Federation literature consultant.
“The Marfa residencies offer not only the quiet, even the solitude, that writers expect in such situations, but also the availability of a modest but convivial and sophisticated cultural environment. This is juxtaposed with one of the most intense natural settings in the United States and exceptional residential amenities. The working environment, therefore, is uniquely what one makes of it and the enticements to work compelling.”
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Forrest Gander, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2005
Born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, and raised in Virginia, Forrest Gander is the author of five books of poetry, including Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower. Gander also writes literary criticism (The Nation, Boston Book Review, The Providence Journal, et al) and translates. His most recent translations are No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé and, with Kent Johnson, Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz.
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Greg Glazner, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2001
Greg Glazner was born in Anson, Texas. After earning a B.A. from Hardin-Simmons University, he attended the University of Montana, where he received both an M.A. and M.F.A.
He is the author of two books of poetry, Singularity (W.W. Norton, 1996) and From the Iron Chair (1992), which was chosen by Charles Wright for the 1991 Walt Whitman Award. His chapbook, Walking Two Landscapes, was published in 1984.
A recipient of the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, his poems have appeared in Ironwood, The Laurel Review, New England Journal, Pequod, Quarterly West, The Southern Poetry Review, and The Texas Review.
Glazner is an associate professor and co-director of the creative writing program at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Residency Area
Explore Lannan
Ann Beattie
"Perfect Recall"
April 05, 2001
Expressing outright admiration for this new collection of stories, Bookworm attempts to pin down Ann Beattie’s elusive techniques: her concrete details that turn abstract, her ability to spin from happiness to tears, and to tell jokes that start our funny, turn sick, and end up tragic.
From Bookworm Interviews