99
North Main
Rochester, VT 05767
(802) 767-9670
Summer Reading Series 2011
Sunday evenings 5:30-6:30 pm unless otherwise noted
No fee except for BigTown BigTent readings
Sunday, July 10
Chin Woon Ping & Martha Zweig
Sunday, July 17
Thomas Powers & Cleopatra Mathis
Sunday, July 31, 7:00-8:00pm
Ellen Bryant Voigt
BigTown BigTent - $15
Sunday, August 14
Tracy Winn & Joan Hutton Landis
Sunday, August 21
Natalie Anderson
booksigning
Woon-Ping Chin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toledo and a B.A. from the University of Malaya. She has been a writer-in-residence at Wilkes University and at the National University of Singapore, where she was also a Senior Fellow. She is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship and was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University. Her poems have been published in many literary journals including Kenyon Review and Westerly, and have been included in many anthologies of Asian American Literature.
Martha Zweig
Martha Zweig was raised in Moorestown, New Jersey, where she attended the Quaker Moorestown Friends' School. She earned her B.A. and an M.A. and a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan; and an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. Her most recent book is Monkey Lightning (Tupelo Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Conduit, Field, Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, Manoa, Notre Dame Review, New Orleans Review, The North American Review, Northwest Review, Paris Review, The Progressive, and Willow Springs.
Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, and is of Greek and Cherokee descent. She is the author of six books of poems, including White Sea, published by Sarabande Books in 2005. Her seventh collection, Book of Dog, will be published by Sarabande in 2012.
Mathis’ work has appeared widely in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals, including The Best American Poetry, 2009, The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Three Penny Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women, and The Practice of Poetry. Various prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001 for What to Tip the Boatman?; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets; two Pushcart Prizes, in 1980 and 2006; The Robert Frost Resident Poet Award; a Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The May Sarton Award; and four Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council.
Mathis is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where she founded the creative writing program in 1982.
Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA and most recently The Killing of Crazy Horse.
Born in 1940 in New York City and educated at Yale University, Thomas Powers worked as a newspaper journalist until 1970, when he quit to become a freelance writer. Powers claims not to have had a job since, but he has certainly kept himself busy: he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for National Reporting at the United Press, and has been a contributor to The Atlantic since 1972. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has also received the National Intelligence Study Center annual book award (in 1980) and the Olive Branch Award for "outstanding coverage of the nuclear-arms issue" (in 1984). Powers is a founding editor of the two-year-old Steerforth Press, of South Royalton, Vermont.
Powers has written numerous book reviews and feature stories for The Atlantic, most of which have focused on nuclear weapons and military policy. In addition to reporting for The Atlantic, he has written extensively for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, Life, and The Nation.
Ellen Bryant Voigt has published seven volumes of poetry – CLAIMING KIN (1976), THE FORCES OF PLENTY (1983), THE LOTUS FLOWERS (1987), TWO TREES (1992); KYRIE (1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award; SHADOW OF HEAVEN (2002), a finalist for the National Book Award; and MESSENGER: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the 2008 Poets’ Prize. She also co-edited an anthology of essays, POETS TEACHING POETS: SELF AND THE WORLD, and collected her own considerations of poetic craft in THE FLEXIBLE LYRIC (1999) and in THE ART OF SYNTAX: RHYTHM OF THOUGHT, RHYTHM OF SONG (2009). For her poems, which have been published in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New England Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review and Slate, she has received the Emily Clark Balch Award, the Hanes Poetry Award, the Teasdale Award, three Pushcart Prizes, inclusion in Scribner's BEST AMERICAN POETRY, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. Voigt designed and directed the nation's first low-residency MFA Writing Program, at Goddard College, and she now teaches in its reincarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has also taught at Iowa Wesleyan College, M.I.T., the University of Cincinnati, Breadloaf and other Writers Conferences, and in brief residencies at numerous colleges and universities. A former Vermont State Poet, she has been inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She grew up in Virginia, went to school in South Carolina, and lives in Vermont.
Tracy Winn, who earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Trust, and the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony. Mrs. Somebody Somebody, her debut collection of fiction, has been recognized as a Must Read by the Massachusetts Book Awards and as a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Award. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, The New Orleans Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review. Tracy lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband. She works with Gaining Ground, an organic farm that gives all of its produce away for hunger relief.
Joan Hutton Landis was born in Morristown, New Jersey. She majored in English at Bennington College, where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz, Howard Nemerov, and Ben Belitt.
After working in publishing, she married Kendall Landis and lived in Paris, Jeddah, Beirut, and Casa Blanca. During those years she wrote and published poetry and was active in theater. Returning to the States in 1967, with her husband and three sons, Landis studied poetry with Richard Wilbur at Wesleyan University, where she earned her masters degree. During that period her work was published in small journals, as well as in the Transatlantic Review and the New York Times.
Landis continued her education, earning a Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr. She was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship for Women. Her articles on Shakespeare were published in Hamlet Studies, The Upstart Crow and the Shakespeare Quarterly, among others. Her reviews of the poetry of Louise Gluck, Ben Belitt, and John Peck appeared in Salmagundi.
In 1977 Landis began teaching at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, helping to form the core curriculum, initiating both poetry and fiction workshops and becoming the first Chair of the Liberal Arts Department. She participated in Frank Bidart’s poetry workshops at the New York Summer Writers’ Institute in Saratoga Springs, where she was encouraged to work on the manuscript that eventually became That Blue Repair.
Landis’s most recent poetry has appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry and Salmagundi.
Nathalie Anderson
Nathalie Anderson's third book of poems, Quiver, has just been published by Rochester's Penstroke Press, and she'll be celebrating that publication in her BigTown reading.
Nathalie Anderson's first book, Following Fred Astaire, won the 1998 Washington Prize from The Word Works, and her second, Crawlers, received the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as APR's Philly Edition, Atlanta Review, Denver Quarterly, DoubleTake, Inkwell Magazine, Journal of Mythic Arts, Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, The New Yorker, Nimrod, North American Review, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Recorder, Southern Poetry Review, and Spazio Humano. Her work has been commissioned for the Ulster Museum's collection of visual art and poetry titled A Conversation Piece; for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Sarah McEneany at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania; and for the artist's press book titled Ars Botanica published by Enid Mark of ELM Press. Her work appears in The Book of Irish American Poetry From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame), and her poems have twice been solicited for inclusion in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St.Martin's). Anderson has authored libretti for three operas – The Black Swan; Sukey in the Dark; and an operatic version of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia – all in collaboration with the composer Thomas Whitman and Philadelphia's Orchestra 2001. A 1993 Pew Fellow, she serves currently as Poet in Residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and she teaches at Swarthmore College, where she is a Professor in the Department of English Literature and directs the Program in Creative Writing.