Writers in Residence

2012 Poet in Residence
Billy Collins



Billy Collins, who served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States, is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. His many prizes and accolades include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; the Poet of the Year Award from Poetry Magazine, the Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry, and the “Literary Lion” Award from the New York Public Library. A Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida, Collins also served as the New York State Poet from 2004-2006. He has been called “the most popular poet in America” in The New York Times, and his similarly popular poetry anthologies have served to broaden the audience for poetry in the United States. 

2012 Novelist in Residence
Joyce Carol Oates



Joyce Carol Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel Them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her many awards include the M.L. Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. Henry Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the National Humanities Medal. Since 2008, Oates has been the the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978.

2011 Novelist in Residence
Dorothy Allison



Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working class story teller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. Her short story collection, Trash (1988) was published by Firebrand Books. Trash won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, (1992) a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a best seller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Cavedweller (1998) became a national bestseller, NY Times Notable book of the year, finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the board of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A novel, She Who, Is forthcoming.

For more information about Dorothy Allison, click here.


2011 Poet in Residence
Marilyn Hacker



    Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve collections of poems, a book of critical essays, and eleven collections of poetry translated from the French. Her most recent books are Names (W. W. Norton, 2009), Essays on Departure, (Carcanet Press, U.K. 2006) and Desesperanto (W.W.Norton, 2003), and the essay collection Unauthorized Voices (University of Michigan Press, 2010).

    Hacker's first collection of poems, Presentation Piece, was published by the Viking Press in 1974. It was both the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of the National Book Award. It was followed by Separations (Alfred A. Knopf, 197) and Taking Notice (Knopf, 1980) and Assumptions  (Knopf, 1985). In 1986, Hacker published Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (Arbor House), a novel-like narrative of a lesbian relationship told through sonnets. In 1990, she published Going Back to the River (Vintage Books), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award. Hacker's 1996 collection, Winter Numbers (W. W. Norton and Company), details the loss of friends to AIDS and cancer, and explores her own struggle with breast cancer. The collection won both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Her Selected Poems: 1965-1990 received the 1996 Poets' Prize.  Her next book, Squares and Courtyards (Norton, 2001) received the Audre Lorde Award of the Publishing Triangle.

    Marilyn Hacker was editor of the feminist literary magazine 13^th Moon in the 1980s, and was editor of the literary quarterly The Kenyon Review from 1990 through 1994.  She is currently co-editor of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, and on the editorial board of the French literary magazine Siècle 21.

     Hacker began publishing translations in 1996 with Claire Malroux’s Edge (Wake Forest University Press).  Other French and Francophone poets she has translated include Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Hédi Kaddour. She received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux). 

    Marilyn Hacker currently lives in Paris. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008.  She received the PEN Voelcker Award for the totality of her own work in 2010.

2010 Poet in Residence
Mark Strand


Pulitzer Prize Winner
Former U.S. Poet Laureate
Recipient of the Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

For more information about Mark Strand, click here.

2010 Novelist in Residence
Simon Mawer


Author of The Glass Room, 2009 Man Booker Prize Short-listed Novel

For more information about Simon Mawer, click here.