Patrick Donnelly
Poetry Seminar Director and Faculty
Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). About Donnelly, Gregory Orr wrote “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, 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.
Tina Cane
2022 Faculty
Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. Cane’s poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common,and Poem-a-Day. She is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz, Once More with Feeling, Body of Work, and the newly released, Year of the Murder Hornet. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and was a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Cane is the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread, and her debut novel-in-verse for young adults, Alma Presses Play, (Penguin/Random House) was released in September 2021.
Phillip B. Williams
2022 Formalist Track Faculty
Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. Author Adrian Matejka notes, “Williams’s poems embody balance: uncompromising and magnetic, surprising and intuitive. Need is everywhere―in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave.” He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.