Lannan Foundation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.