Lannan Foundation

Fiona Maazel, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2006

Fiona Maazel is the former managing editor of The Paris Review. She is also a freelance writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Bomb, The Boston Book Review, Feed.com, GQ, Icon, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Mississippi Review, The National Post, Nerve.com, Pierogi Press, Publishers Weekly, Reader’s Digest, Salon.com, Tin House, The Village Voice, and The Yale Review. She has just finished her first novel.

Rubén Martínez, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2008

Rubén Martínez is an award-winning journalist, author and performer. He is the author of four books: Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City (with Joseph Rodriguez, Powerhouse Books, 2006), The New Americans (The New Press, 2004), Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Picador, 2002), Eastside Stories (with Joseph Rodriguez, Powerhouse Books, 1998), and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (Vintage, 1993). His essays, opinions and reportage have appeared widely in such publications as The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Village Voice, The Nation, Spin, Sojourners, and Mother Jones. His numerous awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship.  He is Professor, Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University, and is currently at work on a book about race, class, and representation in the American Southwest.

Jane Mead, Poet - Marfa, Spring 2004

Jane Mead is the author of two collections of poetry, House of Poured-Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World. She received a Whiting Writers Award in 1992, a Lannan Writing Fellowship in 1999 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.  She has worked on the fringes of the environmental movement for fifteen years and is currently poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University. 

Dinaw Mengestu, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2007

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before.  A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu has written for many publications. He recently reported stories for Harper’s and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur.  His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (titled Children of the Revolution in Britain), has been nominated for The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and earned him a place as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007. He is also the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Rick Moody, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2003

Rick Moody is one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation.  His first novel, Garden State (1992), won the Pushcart Press Editor’s Choice Award. Two years later, he published The Ice Storm, which became an award-winning film directed by Ang Lee.

His other work includes the novel Purple America (1997); the story collections The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (1995) and Demonology (2001); an anthology of essays Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (co-edited with Darcey Steinke, 1999); and the memoir The Black Veil (2002). 

Moody lives in Fishers Island, NY.

Ibrahim Muhawi, Writer and Translator - Marfa, Summer 2004

Ibrahim Muhawi, renowned Palestinian social scientist, has translated numerous articles and books, most notably Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness.  He is coauthor and translator of Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, and is currently translating a collection of stories by Zakaria Tamer, one of the Arab world’s greatest living writers.

He is a Visiting Professor of Folklore and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

Naeem Murr, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2006

Naeem Murr’s first novel, The Boy, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998, won a Lambda Literary Award, and was translated into six languages.  He is also the author of The Genius of the Sea, and The Perfect Man, forthcoming in England in April 2006, and in America early in 2007.  A recipient of numerous awards and scholarships for his writing, he has published a number of prize-winning stories, novellas and nonfiction pieces in literary journals.  Born and brought up in London, he has lived in America since his early twenties, and currently resides in Chicago.

Linda Norton, Poet and Writer - Marfa, Fall 2002

Linda Norton, formerly the poetry editor at the University of California Press, is an editor at Five Fingers Review and has published her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in North American Review, Breukelen, Northwest Review, and many other journals.

Naomi Shihab Nye, Poet and Writer - Marfa, Fall 2003

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist and children’s author. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in many parts of the world including Asia and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Meghan O'Rourke, Writer, Poet - Marfa, Winter 2007

Meghan O’Rourke is Slate Magazine’s literary editor (and its culture editor from 2002-2006). Before joining the magazine, she worked as an editor at The New Yorker. Her writing and poetry have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and other publications. A graduate of Yale University, she holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up.