2012 Cambodia & Vietnam Tour

Participant Bios:


Jon Davis is the author of three chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry, Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite (University of Akron Press, 1995), for which he was honored with a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements (Ontario Review Press, 1987), for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Lannan Residency, and a fellowship to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  He is currently Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught since 1990. He occasionally performs as the peripatetic poet Chuck Calabreze.

 

Jane Mead is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, The Usable Field (Alice James, 2008) House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001) and The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996). Her poems appear regularly in literary journals and are widely anthologized. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, A Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer’s Award, she was for many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She now teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at Drew University, and farms her grandfather’s vineyard in California’s Napa Valley. She is also co-owner of Prairie Lights books in Iowa City, Iowa.

 

Quan Barry was born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore. Quan Barry is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she recently directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing. The author of three books published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (Asylum, Controvertibles, and Water Puppets), her work has appeared in such journals as the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, Ms., and the New Yorker; among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her first play The Mytilenian Debate was a 2011 finalist for both the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Lark Play Development Center’s Playwrights’ Week. She is currently at work on a novel.

 

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Body Clock and The California Poem, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon.  Her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light appeared in 2009.   She has been the recipient of a number of awards, from the NEA, the Fulbright Fellowships, The National Poetry Series, New York Foundation for the Arts, Princeton University’s Stegner Fellowship, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, among others.  She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, At present, Sikelianos teaches in the Naropa Summer Writing Program as well as the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver, which she also directs. 

 

Christopher Merrill’s books include four collections of poetry, Brilliant Water, Workbook, Fevers & Tides, and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Ales Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and five books of nonfiction, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, and Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

 

IWP Staff Coordinator:

Kelly Bedeian

 

Happening Now

  • Congratulations to our colleagues Jennifer Croft and Aron Aji, who are among those serving as judges for the National Book Awards this year, in their case in the category of translated literature.

  • Ranjit Hoskote’s speech at the 2024 Goa Literary Festival addresses the current situation in Gaza.

  • In NY Times, Bina Shah worries about the state of Pakistani—and American—democracy.

  • “I went to [Ayodhya] to think about what it means to be an Indian and a Hindu... ”  A new essay by critic and novelist Chandrahas Choudhury.

  • In the January 2024 iteration of the French/English non-fiction site Frictions, T J Benson writes about “Riding Afrobeats Across the World.” Also new, a next installment in the bilingual series featuring work by students from Paris VIII’s Creative Writing program and the University of Iowa’s NFW program.

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