Vermont College of Fine Arts Welcomes Distinguished Writers to Historic Montpelier Campus

MONTPELIER, Vt., June 19, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Vermont College of Fine Arts  (VCFA), a national center for graduate education in the arts, announced today the prominent writers who will join the MFA in Writing residency as Distinguished Visiting Faculty and Visiting Writers that takes place from June 26^th through July 7^th.

All events are free and open to the public.

Jean Valentine, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965, is the Distinguished Visiting Faculty in Poetry. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.   Reading:  July 1, 7:00 p.m., College Hall Chapel.

Richard Russo, award-winning novelist and screenwriter, joins VCFA President Thomas Christopher Greene for a live, on-stage interview before an audience of students, faculty, staff, and the local community. His novel Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002.  His most recent book is the memoir Elsewhere.  He lives with his wife in Portland, Maine.  July 2, 4:30 p.m., Alumni Hall.

John Warner, Visiting Fiction Writer, is the author of four books, including the novel, The Funny Man, from Soho Press. He is an editor at McSweeney's Internet Tendency and a color-commentator for The Morning News Tournament of Books. He writes about teaching, writing, and teaching writing at Inside Higher Ed, and does a weekly column in his guise of The Biblioracle for the Chicago Tribune's Printers Row book supplement. Following previous stops at the University of Illinois, Virginia Tech, and Clemson, he currently teaches at the College of Charleston.  Reading:  July 4, 7:00 p.m., College Hall Chapel.

Damien Echols, Visiting Creative Nonfiction Writer, was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. At the age of eighteen, he was wrongfully convicted of murder, along with Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley, Jr., thereafter known as The West Memphis Three. Echols received a death sentence and spent almost eighteen years on death row until he, Baldwin, and Misskelley were released in 2011. The WM3 have been the subject of Paradise Lost, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and West of Memphis, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Echols is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Life After Death (2012), and a self-published memoir, Almost Home (2005).   Reading:  June 30, 7:00 p.m., Alumni Hall.

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Visiting Alumni Creative Nonfiction Writer, is the author of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life, part of the University of Nebraska Press American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff. He is a New Letters Literary Award winner, High Desert Journal Obsidian Prize winner, five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the National Magazine Award, Bakeless Literary Prize and Pen Center USA Literary Award. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including New Letters, Fourth Genre, Puerto del Sol and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Arizona Poetry Center and Vermont Studio Center. A 2006 graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, he edits Shadowbox magazine and teaches creative nonfiction at Virginia Commonwealth University.  Reading:  July 1, 7:00 p.m., College Hall Chapel.

About Vermont College of Fine Arts …

Vermont College of Fine Arts is a national center for education in the arts, fostering the excellence of emerging and established artists, while advancing the arts to create a more humane world. Founded in 2008, VCFA is fully accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc. (NEASC), through its Commission on Institutions of Higher Education. VCFA offers the Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing, Writing for Children & Young Adults, Visual Art, Music Composition, Film, and Graphic Design. www.vcfa.edu.

For more information:
Lyn Chamberlin
802.828.8599
[email protected]

SOURCE Vermont College of Fine Arts