Past Retreats

 

Visiting Writers, 2021:

Patricia Hampl first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her Cold War memoir about her Czech heritage. This book and subsequent works have established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 30 years.

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bush Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (twice, in poetry and prose), Ingram Merrill Foundation and Djerassi Foundation. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Ms. Hampl is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where she teaches fall semesters in the MFA program of the English Department. She is also a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program, and affiliated with Kingston University-London as Visiting Professor in the Centre for Life Narratives. She regularly gives readings, lectures and workshops and serves as visiting writer across the country and internationally. More…

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” Patricia Smith is a renaissance artist of unmistakable signature, recognized as a force in the fields of poetry, playwriting, fiction, performance and creative collaboration.

She is the author of six critically-acknowledged volumes of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2014 Rebekah Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy American Poets and the Phillis Wheatley Award in Poetry; Blood Dazzler (a National Book Award finalist), and Teahouse of the Almighty (a National Poetry Series winner), all from Coffee House Press; Close to Death and Big Towns, Big Talk, both from Zoland Books, and Life According to Motown from Tia Chucha Press. She also edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. More…

2020 Retreats: Canceled due to Covid-19

Visiting Writers, 2019:

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Heid E. Erdrich is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media from Michigan State University Press. She is editor of two anthologies of literature by Native writers including NEW POETS OF NATIVE NATIONS from Graywolf Press. Her recent non-fiction work is Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes. Heid’s writing has won awards from Native Arts and Culture Foundation, Loft Literary Center, Minnesota State Arts Board, Minnesota Book Award, and more. You can see her award-winning, collaborative poem films on her Vimeo channel. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program of Augsburg College.

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong-American writer. She is the author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir and Readers Choice, and a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Asian Literary Award in Nonfiction. Her second book, The Song Poet (Metropolitan Books, 2016) won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction Memoir. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, a PEN USA Award in Nonfiction and the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize. The Song Poet has recently been modified into a stage musical, which will be performed at the Ordway theater. In the fall of 2019, Yang will debut her first children’s book, A Map Into the World, a collection titled What God is Honored Here?: An Anthology on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Indigenous Women and Women of Color, and a work of nonfiction about refugee lives in America, Somewhere in the Unknown World. Yang is also a teacher and a public speaker.

 

 

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