We regret the passing, on April 11, 2024, of the distinguished Romanian author and critic Dan Cristea, who served as the editor in chief of the Luceafărul de Dimineață cultural monthly. In addition to being an alum of the 1985 Fall Residency, Cristea received his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.
May 23—June 3, 2011
In late May of 2011, the International Writing Program returned to Kenya in order to host further workshops in Nairobi and in the refugee camps near Dadaab. Partnering with Billy Kahora, editor of the literary magazine Kwani, the United Nations High Council on Refugees, and the U.S. Embassy, IWP program officer Kelly Bedeian accompanied American poets Major Jackson and Jenny Browne to Kenya, where hands-on workshops were held in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi as well as in Ifo, Dagahaley, and Hagadera refugee camps. Additionally, Jackson and Browne participated in readings and question and answer sessions at Oshwal Academy Nairobi Primary School and Makongeni Primary School, both in Nairobi.
Participants
Jenny BROWNE is the author of The Second Reason (University of Tampa Press, 2007), At Once (Tampa, 2003) and the chapbook, Glass (Pecan Grove, 2000). She is also the editor of Provide and Protect, Writers on Planned and Unplanned Parenthood (Wings Press, 2005). A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, she has received grants from the Writers Center of Washington D.C., the Texas Writers League, and the San Antonio Artist Foundation. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, Threepenny Review, Tin House and elsewhere. In 1991-92, she lived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and studied African Literature at Fourah Bay College. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, and teaches creative writing at Trinity University.
Major JACKSON is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (Norton:2010), Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont, and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.
Directing the Tour
Kelly BEDEIAN is a program officer with the IWP.
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