2024 Summer Faculty
2024 Summer Faculty
24 Pearl Street
Provincetown, MA 02657
508.487.9960
Aaron H. Aceves (he/him) is a bisexual, Mexican-American writer born and raised in East L.A. He graduated from Harvard College and received his MFA from Columbia University. His fiction has appeared in jmww, Epiphany, and them., among other places. He currently lives in Texas, where he serves as an Early Career Provost Fellow at UT Austin, and his debut novel, This Is Why They Hate Us, was released by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Mark Adams is a painter/cartographer showing at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, and has 30 years experience in the National Park Service. He has exhibited installations, prints, photography, scientific illustration, and video art, and he was named Artist of the Year by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod. His retrospective, Expedition, was at the Provincetown Art Association Museum in 2017. He has traveled with a sketchbook in hand around the Mediterranean, South America, Asia, and US wildernesses and has illustrated and co-authored a geologic primer, Coastal Landforms of Cape Cod, with Center for Coastal Studies geologist Graham Giese.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is a poet and teacher based in the Pacific Northwest. His latest book, Consider the Rooster, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2024. He is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, Orion, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Poetry and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. He has taught poetry at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kalamazoo College, 826DC, The Queens Center for Gay Seniors, Warren Wilson College, and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Workshop. He holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Iowa.
Seedy Verse: Queer/Trans Ecopoetry
Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas earned a BA in studio arts with distinction from Carleton College and an MFA in print media from Rhode Island School of Design. Barhaugh-Bordas is an artist, activist, and educator who uses a connection-based approach to build community through their creative and scholarly practice. Their solo exhibition at the Handwerker Gallery in Ithaca, New York, explored the notion of becoming local by working with non-native and invasive plants using textiles, sculpture, print, and a 60-foot hand-knotted net.
Nydia Blas is a visual artist who grew up in Ithaca and currently resides in Atlanta. She holds a BS from Ithaca College, and received her MFA from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. She has taught courses for the High Museum of Art, Anderson Ranch, Image Text MFA program at Ithaca College, and Syracuse University in the Department of Transmedia. She has completed artist residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work has been commissioned by The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Airbnb, Harper’s Bazaar, and more.
Paul Bowen came to Provincetown from Wales and lived there for three decades. A Vermont resident, he constructs found wood sculptures and draws with various media, such as inks made from walnuts, squid, and toner. His work is in many collections, including The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The MFA, Boston; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work is represented by the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Pulp in Holyoke, MA, and Tayloe Piggott Gallery in Jackson Hole, WY.
Elizabeth Bradfield designs most of the work published by Broadsided Press. She launched the journal in 2005 and continues to be fascinated by how poetry and art, together, can amplify each other and reach new audiences. Author of five collections of poetry, she has co-edited Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Based on Cape Cod, Bradfield works as a naturalist and teaches at Brandeis University.
Tina Chang, Brooklyn Poet Laureate, is the author of Half-Lit Houses (2004), Of Gods & Strangers (2011), and most recently Hybrida (2019) which was named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by NPR, Lit Hub, The Millions, Oprah magazine, Publisher’s Weekly and was named a New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy collection. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). Chang is the director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University.
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, as well as the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A contributing editor at The New Republic, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and he is the editor of Best American Essays 2022. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award and a NEA Fellowship. He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA and United States Artists. He is core poetry faculty for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.
Kate Clark is a sculptor who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her interspecies sculptures present the viewer with hybrids that transcend human limitations by expanding the boundaries of identity, gender, and origin. They have been exhibited over the past 15 years across the US, France, England, Korea, and Australia. She has exhibited at the Aldrich Museum, Bellevue Arts Museum, Mobile Museum, Frist Center, Glenbow Museum, Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre, Nevada Museum, Newcomb Museum, Hilliard Museum, Biggs Museum, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, J. Paul Getty Museum, and many others. Clark has collaborated with Claudia Rankine, Kanye West/Desiigner, and NatGeo.
Brandy Colbert is the author of several books for children and teens, including Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award; Little & Lion, a Stonewall Book Award winner; and The Only Black Girls in Town. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, as well as critically acclaimed anthologies for young people. She is on faculty at Hamline University’s MFA program in writing for children and lives in Los Angeles.
Garrard Conley is the author of the memoir Boy Erased (Penguin/Riverhead, 2016) and the forthcoming novel, Cana: a romance (Penguin/Riverhead). He is the creator and producer of the podcast Unerased: the History of Conversion Therapy in America (Stitcher, 2018). He has written for The New York Times, The Oxford American, The Independent, TIME, VICE, CNN, and others. Conley currently holds an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing position at Kennesaw State University and is the Executive Director of Georgia Writers. He is currently at work on a book of criticism and a novel.
Mike Curato is the author and illustrator of picture books including the award winning Little Elliot series and Where Is Bina Bear?, as well as Flamer, his debut young adult graphic novel, which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award and the 2021 Massachusetts Book Award. He also illustrated What Are You? by Christian Trimmer, All the Way to Havana by Margarita Engle, Worm Loves Worm by J.J. Austrian, The Power of One by Trudy Ludwig, and What If… and The Sharey Godmother, both written by Samantha Berger. He lives in Northampton, MA.
Joseph Diggs was born to a military family in Croix Chapeau, France and grew up on Cape Cod where he now lives and paints. Diggs’s work is housed in many private collections on the Cape, nationally, and internationally. Joe earned his BFA at Southeastern Massachusetts University then returned, after years of travel and work experience, to earn his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He is currently represented by the Berta Walker Gallery of Provincetown, MA.
Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photography, video, and writing. Their work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of over 45 museums throughout the United States. Their most recent monograph, Look at me like you love me, was published by MACK in 2022.
Sara Farizan (she/her) is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of the young adult novels Dead Flip, Here to Stay, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, and the Lambda Literary award winning If You Could Be Mine, which was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Best YA Books of All Time. She has stories in the anthologies Fresh Ink, All Out, The Radical Element, Hungry Hearts, Come On In, and Fools in Love. She also had a dream come true in writing a DC comics middle-grade graphic novel, My Buddy Killer Croc and the middle grade novel Opportunity Knocks for Scholastic.
Nick Flynn’s most recent books include: This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (Norton, 2020); and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (Ze Books, 2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (Graywolf, 2019). His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012), and has been translated into fifteen languages. His next book, Low, is forthcoming (Graywolf, 2023).
Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark, and Forest Primeval (Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). The Shared World is forthcoming (Northwestern University Press). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry (6x), American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Times, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, among others. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was recently awarded The Aiken-Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Rubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. Rubens has shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions, notably Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY), Mindy Solomon Gallery (FL), Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), Marginal Utility (PA), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. He teaches painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ghenov has been featured in Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, Bomb Magazine, Title Magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Nabil Gonzalez uses various printmaking techniques as a form of representing erasure and loss of identity through matrix repetition, referencing social and political issues affecting the border between the United States and Mexico. She is a Professor at the University of Texas, El Paso where she teaches Printmaking, Drawing, and Graphic Design. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Kimiko Hahn casts a wide net for subject matter. In her new collection Foreign Bodies, she revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, hoarded things, and on. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science. The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, and Shelley Memorial Prize. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Harris has been widely exhibited internationally, including most recently in “Lyle Ashton Harris: Ektachrome Archive” at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami. A solo exhibition of his works spanning three decades was presented by the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in 2022. Lyle is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London, UK, among many others. Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York. His book Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs was published by Aperture in 2017.
David Hilliard creates large-scale multi-paneled color photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him. He exhibits nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards including the Fulbright and Guggenheim. His photographs can be found in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among others. He is regular visiting faculty at Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and Lesley University. Hilliard’s work appears in many publications and is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in NYC, Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta and in Provincetown by the Schoolhouse Gallery.
Pete Hocking is a painter and writer on Cape Cod. He teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Gratz College. From 2003-2021 he taught in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program. He was director of RISD’s Office of Public Engagement (2007-11), and Associate Dean of the College and Director of the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University (1988-2005). He’s a founding board member of Provincetown Commons, an economic development center for the creative economy. Hocking is represented by Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown, MA.
Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry—Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017)—both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a graduate from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Plume Poetry Anthology 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zocalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire with her wife Nickole Brown. Her collection in conversation with Genesis will be out from Four Way Books in 2024.
Monica Youn is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently FROM FROM (Graywolf Press 2023). She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. The daughter of Korean immigrants and a former constitutional lawyer, she is an Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine.
Zehra Khan is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting — the latter often on her fellow humans. She received an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2007, and a BS from Skidmore College. Khan loves traveling to art residencies including Yaddo, the Studios of Key West, Ox-Bow, I-Park, the Vermont Studio Center, Art Space Sonahmoo in Korea, and Space A in Kathmandu. Khan lived year-round in Provincetown from 2007-2018, and now lives in Chicago where she is a member of the gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid.
Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award for Fiction, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards.
Celeste Lecesne (he/they) wrote the short film Trevor, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and he is co-founder of The Trevor Project, the only nationwide lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth. For over 30 years, Lecesne has been telling stories as a playwright, actor, screenwriter, author, and producer. The New York Times has ranked him “among the most talented solo performers of his (or any) generation.” Lecesne is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Future Perfect, a national arts initiative dedicated to amplifying the voices of LGBTQ+ youth.
Paul Lisicky’s books include Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is editor of StoryQuarterly. His seventh book, The Sky in It: A Life with Joni Mitchell, is forthcoming from HarperOne.
Kyle Lukoff is the author of many books for young readers. His debut middle-grade novel, Too Bright To See, received a Newbery honor, the Stonewall award, and was a National Book Award finalist. His picture book When Aidan Became A Brother also won the Stonewall Award, and his book Call Me Max has been banned in schools across the country. He has forthcoming books about mermaids, vegetables, death, and lots of other topics. While becoming a writer he worked as a bookseller for ten years, as well as a school librarian for nine.
Gail Mazur is the author of eight collections of poems, the most recent LAND’S END: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2020). She has taught widely, including in the graduate programs of Boston University, University of Houston, and Emerson College. She is founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, where she lives when not in Provincetown.
Andrew Mockler is a painter and master printer living in Brooklyn, NY. At his printmaking workshop, Jungle Press Editions, Mockler collaborates with artists in lithography, etching, woodcut, and monoprint. He has taught at Yale School of Art, RISD, and Columbia University. He has lectured at Cornell University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christie’s New York, and The Baltimore Museum of Art. His works in painting and printmaking have been exhibited in galleries and museums, including The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, George Billis Gallery (New York and Los Angeles), and Metaphor Gallery (Brooklyn).
Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently novelist and art journalist. Their many books include Pathetic Literature (forthcoming) which they edited, and a “Working Life” (poetry, forthcoming). Myles’s awards include a Guggenheim, a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and in 2022 they were inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Their books have been translated into many languages and Chelsea Girls just won France’s Les Inrockuptibles prize for best foreign novel. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.
Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who writes, lives, and loves in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator, and curator. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University’s 2019 Heimark Artist in Residence as well as the 2021 Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Olayiwola earned her MFA in poetry from Emerson College and is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current Poet Laureate for the city of Boston and the Jacob Ziskind Poet in Residence at Brandeis University. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from TriQuarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route, as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize) and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Candace Perry is a Cape-based playwright with over fifty short and long plays that have been performed in festivals and theaters in the US and Ireland. Regionally, she’s won awards, been selected as a commissioned playwright, and served as a playwright-in-residence. Though she’s written and published in other forms, she finds that the making of a play presents the greatest opportunity and challenge for creating work that might change the world, or nudge it in the right direction. Her writing life has been enriched and interrupted by relationships, activism, teaching, travel, open water swimming, and her clinical social work career. She lives in Wellfleet, MA.
Millian Pham often wrangles with conveying difficult ideas across different materials and mediums. She believes that a strong message can be best received through good craft, sound aesthetic decision, and building the right context. Her works have been shown nationally and internationally. She has attended residencies at I-Park, ACRE, Hambidge, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking (University of Tulsa) and MFA in Sculpture (University of Florida). She currently serves as Art Editor for Broadsided Press, teaches at Auburn University, and is represented by Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of numerous books, including most recently Living Weapon and The Circuit. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. His translations from the Catalan have appeared widely. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and the poetry editor of The New Republic.
Simonette Quamina earned her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York City, the recipient of the 2017-2018 Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center Residency, the 2017 Salem Art Works Fellowship and currently a 2020 Queen Sonja Print Award Nominee. She is an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the Eastern Connecticut State.
Victoria Redel is the author of five books of fiction and four poetry collections, most recently Paradise (2022). Her work has been widely anthologized, translated, and her novel, Loverboy, was adapted for a feature film. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and the NEA. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Seema Reza is the author of the books A Constellation of Half-Lives and When the World Breaks Open. She is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, a non-profit organization that brings workshops led by professional artists to service members, veterans, and clinicians, and is featured in the 2018 HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. Her writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The LA Review, LitHub, and Electric Literature among others. Case studies from her work with military populations have appeared in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Related Diseases in Combat Veterans.
Cecilia Ruiz is the author and illustrator of The Book of Memory Gaps, The Book of Extraordinary Deaths, and A Gift from Abuela—a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. Her geometric, stamp-like style lends itself to simple, happy expressions, but her most compelling works are the ones in which melancholy hides within the bold colors and shapes. Her next picture book, Mr. Fiorello’s Head, comes out in the summer of 2023. Cecilia was born and raised in Mexico City and now lives in New York City, where she teaches illustration and graphic design at Queens College, Parsons and the School of Visual Arts.
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. Her 20th book, LET THE RECORD SHOW: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993 was published in 2021.
Dani Shapiro is a bestselling novelist and memoirist and host of the podcast Family Secrets. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Time. She has taught at Columbia and New York University and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference. Her new novel, Signal Fires, was published by Knopf in October 2022.
Bishakh Som is an Indian-American trans femme visual artist and author. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Review, and The Georgia Review, amongst other publications. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda finalist. Som’s artwork has been exhibited at The Society of Illustrators, the Grady Alexis Gallery, De Cacaofabriek, and Art Omi.
Susanna Sonnenberg is the author of two memoirs, Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships, both published by Scribner and New York Times Bestsellers. Her creative personal nonfiction and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. She teaches memoir and other writing classes online and in person from Missoula, Montana, where she has lived for 30 years.
James Stroud is a painter and master printer who is the Founder/Director of Center Street Studio, a professional printmaking workshop that prints and publishes contemporary prints with emerging and established artists. His work is represented in several public collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; The Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; and the Fogg Art Museum.
Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA CW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Winner of the PEN Jean Stein Grant, her memoir WHISKEY TENDER is forthcoming from HarperCollins Harper in 2023. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, Public Space, Rona Jaffe, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City where she earned her MFA degree in Creative Writing, she is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Her work can be found in the Boston Review, LARB, A Public Space, Salon, and elsewhere.
Rashod Taylor (b.1985) is an emerging contemporary photographer whose work is a window into the Black American experience. Taylor attended Murray State University and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Art with a specialization in Fine Art Photography. He has since exhibited and been published nationally and internationally. Most recently his Little Black Boy series was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and received the 2021 Arnold Newman Prize For New Directions in Photographic Portraiture. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Guardian and CNN among others. Rashod lives in Springfield, MO.
Alexandra Teague is the author of a forthcoming memoir, a novel, and three books of poetry, most recently Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea 2019), which considers representations of women in art, and gives voice to both artworks and models. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, and a founding member of the BASK interdisciplinary arts collective. A former Stegner, NEA, and Civitella Ranieri Fellow, she is a professor in and co-directs the MFA program at University of Idaho.
Vicky Tomayko is an artist and printmaker who lives in Truro, MA. She manages the print shop for the Fine Arts Work Center during the seven-month Fellowship Program, doing workshops, facilitating projects, and working to maintain and improve the printmaking experience. Tomayko also teaches silkscreen at Cape Cod Community College. Her work can be seen at Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Tomas Vu was born in Saigon, Vietnam and at the age of ten moved with his family to El Paso, Texas. Tomas received a BFA from the University of Texas, El Paso, and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University. He has been a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts since 1996 and was appointed the LeRoy Neiman Professor of Visual Arts in 2000. In 1996, Vu helped to found the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Since its inception, he has served as Director/Artistic Director of the Neiman center.
Joan Wickersham is the author of The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, and The News from Spain. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in many publications, including The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She writes a regular op-ed column for The Boston Globe. Wickersham has taught fiction and memoir at Harvard, Emerson, UMass Boston, and the Bennington Writing Seminars.
For the last 20 years Melissa Wilkinson has served as an academic teaching at various institutions throughout the country. She received her BFA in painting from Western Illinois University in 2002 then went on to receive her MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006. Her work has been featured in wide reaching publications throughout the country including three editions of New American Paintings and the Manifest Drawing Annual four times. She has shown in various galleries nationally and internationally including South Korea, Canada, India, and Art Basel Miami and has won numerous awards throughout her career. She has won several fellowships and grants including the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Painting in 2012, a Middle East Studies Grant to create an image archive in Israel in 2016, and a National Women in the Arts Grant to do the same at the Smithsonian in 2019. Her work is among private collections throughout the country and abroad. She serves as Assistant Professor of Art-Painting at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. She splits her time with studios in both North Carolina and the Hudson Valley in New York. She is represented by OnCenter Gallery in Provincetown.
Forrest Williams is a figurative painter who has shown his work in San Francisco, New York, Portland, Montreal, and for numerous summers at Provincetown’s AMP gallery. He was an English major undergrad at Davidson College and then received his MFA in painting at the New York Academy of Art. He now lives and works in both New York City and Provincetown. This is his fourth summer teaching at FAWC.
Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Lucy 72; Carmelina: Figures; and Virgil Kills: Stories. Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz; principal faculty of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).
Janine Wong is an artist, architect and graphic designer who taught design and book arts at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She makes artist books and prints often in collaboration with scholars and scientists. Her most recent projects include artist books in collaboration with MIT scientists working out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researching plankton blooms and deep ocean currents. She exhibits her work nationally and is included in several public institutions including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery, and Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond.
