Past Residents
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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Richard Grant, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2001
Richard Grant, an Englishman based in Tucson, Arizona, is a freelance writer with 12 years experience in magazine journalism. He is currently working on his first book, a study of nomadism and wandering in North America, drawing on personal experience with nomadic subcultures such as rodeo cowboys, truck drivers, tramps, hobos, traveling vendors, festival-goers and retirees in motor homes.
He has written for many publications including The Independent Magazine, The Telegraph, British Esquire, Los Angeles Magazine, Details and The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine.
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Linda Gregg, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2003
Linda Gregg was born in Suffren, New York, grew up in bucolic Marin County, California, and has traveled extensively. Her poetry collections include Things and Flesh, Chosen by the Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma, and Too Bright to See.
She has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and the University of California-Berkeley. She has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and she is the 2003 winner of the Sara Teasdale Award. Gregg lives in New York City.
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Allan Gurganus, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2005
Allan Gurganus, the novelist and short-story writer, was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., in 1947. He is the author of the highly-acclaimed novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, the collection of stories and novellas White People, and the novel Plays Well with Others. His latest work, The Practical Heart: Four Novellas, won the Lambda Literary Award. Called “the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty,” he returned from Manhattan to live in his native North Carolina where he currently teaches at Duke and co-founded Writers Against Jesse Helms. His political editorials often appear in The New York Times. Gurganus’ next novel, second in The Falls Trilogy that commenced with Widow, is The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.
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Saskia Hamilton, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2000
Saskia Hamilton is a graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio. She received her M.A. from New York University in 1991. Ms. Hamilton has been the Director of the Literary Programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliff University and is editing a collection of the letters of Robert Lowell.
During her Lannan residency Ms. Hamilton continued work on the Lowell book and completed several poems. Ms. Hamilton lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and her first book of poetry is called As For Dream (Greywolf Press, 2001).
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Andrea Higgins, Artist - Santa Fe, Winter 2000
Andrea Higgins is a painter working in San Francisco. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1992. While an undergraduate, Ms. Higgins spent a semester at the New York Studio School and was chosen for the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Art.
In 1993 she began attending the graduate program for painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and received her M.F.A. in 1995. Following the completion of her M.F.A., Ms. Higgins spent a year in Denspasar, Bali teaching painting.
She has won several fellowships and grants, which include the Luce Scholars Program Grant, the P.O.D. Studio Art Award from Dartmouth College, and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale University. Her work has been shown primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area.
During her residency Ms. Higgins continued working on a series of precisely crafted paintings based on fabric patterns.
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Fanny Howe, Writer, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2006
Fanny Howe grew up in Boston and moved to California when she was seventeen. Since then she has written many novels, poems and essays. She has won two NEA awards, a California Council for the Arts Award, a Guggenheim and the Lenore Marshall poetry award among others and has taught at Tufts University, Columbia, MIT and is Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego. Five of her novels are appearing in one volume in Fall, 2006, from Nightboat Books. This collection will be titled Radical Love.
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Lewis Hyde, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2002
Lewis Hyde, Luce Professor of Art and Politics at Kenyon College, is the author of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, an exploration of the “trickster” character who appears in the myths and traditional stories of many cultures.
He also has written, edited, and translated several books, including This Error is the Sign of Love; Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking; On the Work of Allen Ginsberg; and The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.
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Dahr Jamail, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2008
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for more than four years, and is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. He also has reported from Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. He writes for Inter Press Service, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other outlets. His reports have been published in the Nation, The Sunday Herald, The Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, and The Independent, among other publications. On radio as well as television, he has reported for Democracy Now!, and numerous other stations around the globe. Jamail is also special correspondent for “Flashpoints” (KPFK Radio/Pacifica).
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Gish Jen, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2003
Gish Jen has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, among other periodicals, as well as in numerous textbooks and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.
Jen has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently holds a Strauss Living from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999 she was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.
She has published three novels. Her first book, Typical American (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Its sequel, Mona in the Promised Land (Knopf, 1996), was named one of the ten best books of 1996 by The Los Angeles Times. Her third novel is called The Love Wife. A story collection, Who’s Irish?, was published by Knopf in 1999. All of her books have been New York Times notable books.
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Tyehimba Jess, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2007
Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly, is a collection of lyric poems which tell the story of blues man, Huddie “Leadbelly” Leadbetter, and was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a 2006 Whiting Writers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004, the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and has twice been on the Chicago Green Mill Slam teams. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Simone Aaberg Kaern, Artist - Santa Fe, Fall 2000
Simone Kaern was born in 1969 in Cophenhagen, Denmark. Her solo exhibitions include Sisters in the Sky, Project Room, ARCO, Madrid, Spain, 2000; Air, Kunstakademiets kunstforening, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1995; wanna fly, SAGA Basement, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1995.
Her group exhibitions include dAPERTutto: 48th International Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1999, and Nordic Nomads, White Columns, New York, 1998.
While in residence, Ms. Kaern, a pilot as well as an artist, worked on a project based on the idea of unassisted human flight.
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Hinewirangi Kohu-Morgan, Activist and Writer - Santa Fe, Winter 2001
Hinewirangi Kohu-Morgan is a Maori artist, poet, and activist, who lives and works in Aotearoa (New Zealand). She is a Board Member of the International Indian Treaty Council and is a Representative for the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement.
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Dana Levin, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2001
Dana Levin grew up in the Mojave Desert in California and attended Pitzer College and the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.
Levin’s honors include the 2000 Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2000 GLCA New Writers Award, a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a 1998 Pushcart Prize.
“I arrived with a mess, and left with a book.”
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Deborah Levy, Writer and Poet - Marfa, Spring 2004
Deborah Levy, playwright, novelist and poet, was born in 1959 in South Africa and after moving to Britain studied at Dartington College of Arts and Trinity College, Cambridge. Her novels include Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl and most recently, Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places, a collection of short stories.
Levy was awarded a Lannan Writing Fellowship in 2001 and lives in London.
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Yiyun Li, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2006
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Named by The Los Angeles Times as one of the three authors to watch in 2005, her first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, has won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her other awards include the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review for the short story “Immortality,” and a Pushcart prize. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons, and teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.
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Glenn Ligon, Artist - Santa Fe, Winter 2000
Glenn Ligon was born in 1960, in the Bronx, New York. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, and at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Mr. Ligon lives and works in New York and is represented by D’Amelio Terras Gallery. During his six-week residency he focused mainly on a new body of works on paper for an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum. Mr. Ligon was also able to begin work on an upcoming project for the Walker Art Center.
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Barry Lopez, Poet - Galisteo, Summer 1999
Mr. Lopez’s books include the nonfiction works Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award, Of Wolves and Men, and Crossing Open Ground; and the fiction collections Winter Count, Desert Notes, and Field Notes.
Asked to consider the role of the writer, Mr. Lopez has said, “I like to use the word isumatug. It’s of eastern Arctic Eskimo dialect and refers to the storyteller, meaning ‘the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.’ I think that’s the writer’s job. It’s not to be brilliant, or to be the person who always knows, but… to be the one who recognizes the patterns that remind us of our obligations and our dreams.”
The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award in Nonfiction, the American Book Award, and the John Burroughs Medal, among other honors, Mr. Lopez lives in rural Oregon. His residency lasted from August 20 to September 10, 1999.
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David Wong Louie, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2004
David Wong Louie was born and raised in New York and was educated at Vassar College and The University of Iowa.
He is the author of the novel The Barbarians are Coming and the short story collection Pangs of Love, which won The Los Angeles Times Book Review First Fiction Award, the Ploughshares First Fiction Book Award, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1991 and a Voice Literary Supplement Favorite of 1991. He was also awarded a Lannan Writing Fellowship in 2001.
Louie currently teaches in the Department of English and the Asian-American Studies Center at UCLA and lives in Venice, CA.
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Peter Lewis is a poet and a member of the board of Copper Canyon Press, one of the most acclaimed literary presses in the U.S. Mr. Lewis is currently producing several documentary films including one with Jim Harrison on the vanishing authenticity of food and wine in France.
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