Now entering in its thirtieth year, the Festival of Poetry is one of America’s longest-running and most admired gatherings of poets.
This is a daily immersion in listening, reflection, and conversation about the pleasures and challenges of poetic work.
The Fellows are in residence throughout the week, with a different Guest Faculty poet present each day for a morning lecture, afternoon workshop, and evening reading.
Participants rotate through workshops conducted by the Fellows and may express preferences for which Guest Faculty workshop they would like to attend.
There will be time during the week for the composition of new work, and indeed at two of their daily workshops participants are asked to present a completely new poem and a new revision.
2008 Guest Poets for the Festival, each present for one day to deliver a morning craft talk, lead an afternoon workshop, and give an evening reading:
Cornelius Eady (Saturday, August 2): Born and raised in Rochester, New York, he is the author of seven books of poems, including Brutal Imagination (2001), finalist for the National Book Award; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. In 1996, Cornelius Eady and poet Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving black poets of various backgrounds as a haven for intellectual engagement and critical debate. He has collaborated with jazz composer Deidre Murray in the production of several works of musical theater, including Running Man, a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999, and Brutal Imagination, which received Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award in 2002. He has served as director of the Poetry Center at SUNY Stony Brook and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, City College of New York, The Writer’s Voice, The College of William and Mary, and Sweet Briar College. He is now director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame and lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife, novelist Sarah Micklem.
Susan Howe (Thursday, July 31): Author of more than twenty books, her work persistently trespasses genre boundaries, entwining elements of essay, speculative fiction, and poetry; her books are layered in historical, mythical and personal insights, with a strong and complex attention to sound. As Susan Howe explained in an interview: I would want my readers to play, to enter the mystery of language, . . . Her most recent poetry collections are Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), The Midnight (2003), and Kidnapped (2002). Her innovative and influential books of criticism include The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an International Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (reissued in a new edition, in 2007). She has also created two CDs with experimental musician David Grubbs. From 1989 until her recent retirement, she was professor of English at the SUNY Buffalo, ultimately with an endowed chair. From 2000 through 2005 she served as an elected Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
Baron Wormser (Friday, August 1): 
In the spring of 2008, Baron Wormser published three books in three genres: Scattered Chapters: New & Selected Poems, The Poetry Life: Ten Stories, and the paperback edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid. He is also co-author of two superb guides for teachers, Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine, Augusta, and he served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2006. He is currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program and works as an independent poetry teacher and mentor. He lives with his wife in Marshfield, Vermont.
Maxine Kumin has published sixteen books of poetry, including most recently Still to Mow (2007). She is also the author of a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (2000); four novels; a collection of short stories; more than twenty children's books; and four books of essays, including Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (2000). Among her awards are the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert Frost Medal, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sarah Joseph Hale Award, the Levinson Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Council on the Arts. She has served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She lives in New Hampshire.
Jean Valentine (Tuesday, July 29): Born in Chicago, she earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College and has lived most of her life in New York City. Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965 for her first book, Dream Barker. Her most recent books are Little Boat (2007) and Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003, winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. In 2000, she was awarded The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Recordings of Jean Valentine reading her poems can be heard at: jeanvalentine.com/poems1 Adrienne Rich has written, “Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way.”
On Sunday, July 27, the first day of the Festival, the Guest Poet will be James Hoch, who is in residence at The Frost Place during the summer of 2008. James Hoch’s first book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in 2003 by Silverfish Review Press. His second book, Miscreants, was published by Norton in 2007. Originally from Collingswood, New Jersey, he lives now with his wife and their son in Grandview, New York. He has taught at Franklin and Marshall College and Lynchburg College, and he currently teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Read more about the Resident Poet award...
2008 Fellows for the Festival, who will be present throughout the week, facilitating afternoon workshops with different participants each day:
Patrick Donnelly's collection of poems is The Charge (Ausable, 2003). He is an associate editor at Four Way Books and has taught writing at Smith College, the New School University, Clark University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was Thornton writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College in 2006 and is serving on the writing and literature faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, for the 2007–08 academic year. His poems have been featured on the websites Poetry Daily in 2002 and 2003 and Verse Daily in 2003 in print in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Rattapallax, and The Marlboro Review as well as the anthologies The Four Way Reader #2 and The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present. From the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference he received a scholarship in 2003 and a fellowship in 2004, and was awarded grants from the PEN Fund for Writers in 2000 and 2001. He lives in western Massachusetts.
Linda Susan Jackson’s first full-length collection of poems, What Yellow Sounds Like, was a finalist in the 2006 National Poetry Series Competition and was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2007. She previously published two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty, both with Black-eyed Susan Publishing. Most recently her work has appeared in Ringing Ear, Crab Orchard Review, Brilliant Corners, Asheville Poetry Review, Gathering Ground, Heliotrope, and Rivendell, and she has been featured reading and talking about her poetry on the From the Fishouse audio archive (fishousepoems.org/poets). Linda Susan has been a Cave Canem fellow and 2007 recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and she is assistant professor and deputy chair of the English Department at Medgar Evers College / City University of New York.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, now Ukraine. His paternal grandfather had been killed by Stalin, his grandmother sent to Siberia, and his father stolen from an orphanage and raised by an uncle. When he was sixteen, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rampant crime and inflation and anti-Semitism forced Ilya’s family to seek political asylum in the United States. They arrived in Rochester, New York, in 1993, not knowing any English, but six years later Ilya was a Georgetown University graduate and Phillips Exeter Academy’s youngest-ever writer-in-residence. He is author of the chapbook Musica Humana (2002) and the book Dancing In Odessa (2004), which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Series. Ilya also writes poetry in Russian. In the late 1990s, he co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization that sponsors readings to support relief organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Survivors International. After having earned a law degree and worked at Bay Area Legal Aid helping impoverished and homeless people solve legal difficulties, Ilya now teaches writing and literature at San Diego State University.
Ellen Doré Watson is author of three collections of poems: We Live in Bodies (1997) and Ladder Music (2001) from Alice James Books, and This Sharpening (2006) from Tupelo Press. In addition, she is has translated eleven books, primarily from Brazilian Portugese, including The Alphabet in the Park (1990), the selected poems of Adelia Prado. She has also co-translated (with Saadi Simawe) contemporary Palestinian poetry from Arabic. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. and among her honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Library Journal named Ellen one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” She is now director of The Poetry Center at Smith College, and she serves as an editor at The Massachusetts Review and offers private writing workshops and manuscript consultations.
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