Past Residents
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.
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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.
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Semezdin Mehmedinović, Poet - Marfa, Winter 2008
Semezdin Mehmedinović was born in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1960, and was educated at the University of Sarajevo. In 1994, with five other Bosnian writers, he received the Hellman-Hammet Award from PEN for persistence in preserving democracy in the midst of war. Mehmedinović arrived in the United States as a political refugee in 1996. His books include Sarajevo Blues (1998) and Nine Alexandrias (2003). He currently lives in Alexandria, VA.
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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.
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Carol Moldaw, Poet - Marfa, Fall 2006
Carol Moldaw is the author of four books of poetry: The Lightning Field, winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize, Chalkmarks on Stone, Through the Window, and Taken from the River. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a NEA Fellowship in poetry, Moldaw’s work has most recently appeared in Provincetown Arts, FIELD, and Conjunctions. She lives in Pojoaque, New Mexico, and teaches at Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s brief-residency M.F.A. program.
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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.
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Lorrie Moore, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2004
Lorrie Moore was born in Glen Falls, New York, and was educated at St Lawrence and Cornell Universities. Her books include Self-Help, Anagrams, The Forgotten Helper, Like Life, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Birds of America.
She has received numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts award in 1989, the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1989, the Guggenheim fellowship in 1991 and a Lannan Writing Fellowship in 2001.
Moore is currently Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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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.
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Karin Apollonia Muller, Artist - Galisteo, Summer 2000
Karin Mueller was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1963. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them an artist commission from the Getty/CAL Arts Grant in 2000 and a DAAD Fellowship in 1995. She is represented by the Craig Kull Gallery in Los Angeles and was exhibited at the Getty Center in 2002.
Her work has been placed in the collections of the Allen Memorial Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, the Photography Museum in San Francisco and the IFA in Berlin. While in residence, Ms. Muller created a series about the native land and how disappearance translates in the landscape of the Southwest.
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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.
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Jean-Luc Mylayne, Artist - Galisteo, Summer 1999
Jean-Luc Mylayne was born in Amiens, France in 1946. He has had major solo exhibitions at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne.
During his residency, Mr. Mylayne focused on photographing the Mountain Bluebird, commonly found in New Mexico.
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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.
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Sigrid Nunez, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2002
Sigrid Nunez is the author of four novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury and For Rouenna.
She has been the recipient of several literary awards, including a Whiting Writer’s Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. A Feather on the Breath of God was a finalist for the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction.
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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.
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Dennis O'Driscoll, Poet - Santa Fe, Winter 2001
Dennis O’Driscoll, one of Ireland’s most widely published and respected critics of poetry, was born in County Tipperary, Ireland. A civil servant since the age of 16, he works for Irish Customs in Dublin.
He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Exemplary Damages. He has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, and the Harvard Review. O’Driscoll, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1999, was a featured author for Readings & Conversations in 2001 and 2003.
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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.
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Peter Orner, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2008
Peter Orner’s first book was Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) a well-received collection of 34 stories about which writer and critic Margot Livesay said in The New York Times, “Orner doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls.” His second book is the funny, brilliant, and lyrical novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006). Similar in construction to his story collection, some of the chapters are just a page, in the novel Orner offers an extraordinary cast of characters, including Mavala Shikongo, a former guerrilla, through whose past we learn the often violent history of Namibia. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and Best American Stories . Orner has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Born in Chicago, he currently lives in San Francisco.
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Daniel Orozco, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2006
Daniel Orozco’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, as well as in magazines like Harper’s, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, and Story Quarterly. He was awarded a 2006 NEA Fellowship in fiction, and his story “Samoza’s Dream” was a finalist for a 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. The story first appeared in McSweeney’s. In addition, his story “Officers Weep,” which first appeared in Harper’s, was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for inclusion in the Best American Mystery Stories 2005. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.
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Simon Ortiz, Writer and Poet - Galisteo, Summer 2000
Poet, writer, and storyteller, Simon Ortiz’s books include Woven Stone, From Sand Creek, and After and Before the Lightning. In the late 1980’s, Mr. Ortiz held official tribal positions as Interpreter and First Lieutenant Governor of Acoma Pueblo, his native community in New Mexico.
As a major Native American writer he insists on telling the story of his people’s land, culture, and community, a story that has been marred by social, political, and economic conflicts with Euro-American society. Ortiz’s insistence, however, is upon a story that stresses vision and hope by creative struggle and resistance to human and technological oppression.
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Rubén Palma, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2005
Born in Santiago, Chile in 1954, Rubén Palma grew up in one of Santiago’s larger, working-class quarters of that time. He left Chile in 1973, immediately following the coup. Since 1974, he has resided in Denmark and is now a Danish citizen. Employed by the Danish Red Cross since 1985, he is a member of the Danish Author’s Society and has published three works of fiction in Denmark to critical praise, Letter to Denmark, Meeting with Denmark, and The Trail We Leave. His two plays, To the Flesh--To the Heart and The Trade were published and performed in Denmark.
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Explore Lannan
Dr. Cornel West with Amy Goodman
Wednesday 25 June 2003
Dr. Cornel West has been described as one of America’s most vital and eloquent public intellectuals.
Continued...
From Cultural Freedom