Patrick Donnelly Poetry Seminar Director
Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry. Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, and an associate editor of Poetry International. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan- U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. He lives outside of Northampton, Massachusetts.
2020 Faculty Rebecca Foust
Rebecca Foust’s six books include The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, winner of the 2018 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Award and released in October 2019, and Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. Recognitions include the CP Cavafy and James Hearst Prizes (Poetry), the Lascaux Review and American Literary Review Prizes (Fiction), the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Sewanee, and West Chester Poetry Conference. Foust was the 2017-19 Marin County Poet Laureate and works as Poetry Editor for Women’s Voices for Change, an assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine, and producer of a local TV show about poetry in Marin County, Rising Voices.
2020 Faculty Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. frank: sonnets is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2021. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Seuss has been a visiting professor for the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the MFA program in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
2020 Faculty Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Smith collaborated with the photographer Michael Abramson on the book Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago’s South Side From the Seventies (2015). Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.
2020 Work Fellow Justin Danzy
Justin Danzy’s work has appeared in The Offing, On the Seawall, New Ohio Review, Frontier, Guesthouse, and elsewhere. He was the 2019 Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place and received an Academy of American Poets Prize from Washington University in St. Louis, where he completed his MFA. He is originally from Southfield, Michigan.