Lannan Foundation

V. Penelope Pelizzon, Poet, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2008

V. Penelope Pelizzon’s first poetry collection, Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Norma Farber First Book Award. Other honors include a Discovery/The Nation Award, The Kenneth Rexroth Translation Award (for Umberto Saba’s poems from Italian), and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize.  Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New England Review, and elsewhere.  She is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at The University of Connecticut.

Caryl Phillips, Writer - Marfa, Winter 2001

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, brought up in Leeds, England, and now lives in New York City. He is the author of three works of non-fiction and eight novels, as well as the editor of two anthologies. His latest novel, Dancing In The Dark, re-imagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Fellowship.

“An almost idyllic retreat in a sumptuous landscape. A perfect place to both work hard and recharge the worn-out urban batteries.”

Richard Powers, Writer - Marfa, Spring 2005

Richard Powers has said, “fiction can travel anywhere, and probably should.” He is the author of nine novels that explore connections among disparate disciplines such as photography, artificial intelligence, music composition, molecular biology, game theory, and American business.  His recent novel, The Echo Maker, which won the 2006 National Book Award, is a gripping mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation.  His other novels include Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.2, Gain, Plowing the Dark, and The Time of Our Singing. He has been called one of the greatest American novelists of his generation.

“There’s something about the entire configuration--the spare Chihuahuan desert, the air of the Marfa Plateau, the openness of the town, the intensity of the surrounding mountains, the beautiful design of the new house--that makes it extraordinarily conducive to clarity and verbal focus.”

Mary Rakow, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2004

Mary Rakow, a native Californian, has a Masters Degree in Theological Studies from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Theology from Boston College. Her first novel, The Memory Room, was published in 2002. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2003.

Peter Reading, Poet - Marfa, Spring 1999

Mr. Reading was born in Liverpool, England, in 1947 and studied painting at the Liverpool College of Art.  He is one of the most inventive and challenging poets in England. His language is brilliantly original, compassionate, and laced with acid humor. Mr. Reading was the first writer to hold a one-year writing Lannan residency in Marfa, Texas. In June of 1999 Mr. Reading read from his work composed during his residency, as part of Readings & Conversations.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in his native England. Reading is one of Britain’s most controversial poets: angry, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, heartbreaking, and prolific. His work is experimental, playing with formal traditions of English in liberating ways, and he has produced a body of work that is frequently interrelated across book titles. His poetry has been collected into three volumes by Bloodaxe (UK) and critical assessments of his work have been written by Neil Roberts, Sean O’Brien, and Anthony Thwaite. “Anger is a country Peter Reading has been colonising for years. . .his anger is expressed with classical clarity. Rage against the state of the nation, yes, but also rage against the darkness of death, exile, and inability to show love.” - The Observer (London)

Adrienne Rich, Poet - Galisteo, Spring 2000

Adrienne Rich received the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. Born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, she has written more than sixteen books of poetry, including Midnight Salvage, Dark Fields of the Republic, and An Atlas of the Difficult World.

Her essay collections include What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

While in residence Ms. Rich worked on a group of new poems.

Andrew N. Rubin, Writer - Marfa, Summer 2007

Andrew N. Rubin is the author of Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture and the Cold War, forthcoming from the University of California, Berkeley Press. He is also the co-editor of Adorno: A Critical Reader and the co-editor of The Edward Said Reader, a New York Times Book Review notable book of the year. He has written on the subject of twentieth century culture and politics for magazines and journals including Alif: The Journal of Comparative Poetics, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The Journal of Palestine Studies, The Nation, The New Statesman, and al-ahram.  He is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University.

Peter Sacks, Poet - Marfa, Summer 1999

Mr. Sacks’s books of poetry include In These Mountains, Promised Lands, and the recent Natal Command. He is also the author of The English Elegy: Studies in Genre from Spenser to Yeats.

Born in South Africa in 1950, he fled his native country during the apartheid era to avoid fighting racial wars in the army. He has said, “I was raised in South Africa. I am now an expatriate, but I am still caught up in that country’s history. My work in poetry has usually sought to balance an openness to physical beauty on the one hand against historical suffering on the other.”

Mr. Sacks, who teaches English at Harvard University, is also working on a book on Leonardo da Vinci. Mr. Sacks’s residency in Marfa lasted two months.

Fred Sandback, Artist - Santa Fe, Spring 1999

In conjunction with Fred Sandback’s residency, the foundation exhibited work he created during his stay in Santa Fe. The exhibition at Lannan consisted of an installation created for the foundation’s main gallery and related drawings in the adjacent conference room and entranceway.

Mr. Sandback refers to his work as sculpture that “doesn’t take over space, but rather coexists with it.” His work consists of lines in space, created by common knitting yarn, that suggest volume.

Speaking of his sculptures, Mr. Sandback says he left “…discrete sculptural volumes for a sculpture which becomes less of a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built of thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.”

Mr. Sandback was born in Bronxville, New York, in 1943. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, student of philosophy. He then transferred to the sculpture program at Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where he received both a B.F.A. in 1966 and an M.F.A in 1969. Since then Sandback’s work has been exhibited regularly in the United States and Europe. He died in New York in 2003.

Wallace Shawn, Writer - Galisteo, Winter 1999

Wallace Shawn is an Obie-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor. His most recent play, The Designated Mourner, was made into a film starring Mike Nichols, Miranda Richardson, and David de Keyser.

Mr. Shawn’s other plays include The Fever; My Dinner with André, co-written with André Gregory; and Our Late Night. Mr. Shawn lives in New York City.