Pabst Endowed Fund Atlantic Center for the Arts
In 2007, The Pabst Charitable Foundation for the Arts established an Endowment for Master Writers at Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Writers chosen as "Master Writers" are vetted and selected with specific criteria: a body of work demonstrating excellence and a
willingness to mentor and guide fellow writers.
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2008 Pabst Endowed Chairs for Master Writers
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Chase Twichell (Residency #127: Feb 18 - March 9)
Chase Twichell has published five books of poems: The Snow Watcher, The Ghost of Eden, Perdido, The Odds, and Northern Spy, and the co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach. She also has a book of translations of Tagore (with Tony K. Stewart), The Lover of God, published by Copper Canyon Press. Her newest book of poems is Dog Language, published in 2005, also by Copper Canyon Press.
Twichell views writing a poem as an act of questioning what it means to have human consciousness and the language to truthfully and accurately convey it, so that the finished poem throws a fresh and surprising light on what it means to be sentient. A practicing Buddhist, her poems reflect her spiritual practice within the ancient tradition of Basho and Dogen and the contemporary company of Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin. Robert Hass wrote of Twichell’s poems that they are “full of sharp observation, …a sinewy intellectual toughness, and… a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity. “
In her most recent book, Dog Language, Twichell boldly announces its manifesto: To tell the truth, with no decoration, and with the remembrance of death. What holds us back, she asks, from saying things outright? From telling the plain picture: “the plain picture, / as Bob Dylan put it. / “Truth,” he said, “Why, / truth is just the plain picture.”
Twichell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997, she won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. She was awarded a Smart Family Foundation Award in 2004 for poems published in the Yale Review. She’s taught at Warren Wilson College, The University of Alabama, Goddard College, Hampshire College, and Princeton University. In 1999, she left the academic world of teaching to start Ausable Press, an independent literary press dedicated to publishing contemporary poetry that “investigates and expresses human consciousness in language that goes where prose cannot.” |
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Tony Hoagland (Residency #129: May 19 – June 8)
Tony Hoagland is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and What Narcissism Means to Me, all by Graywolf Press. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares. Hoagland currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston. He is the winner of the 2005 O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize. Awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is the only national prize to recognize a poet's teaching as well as his art. Hoagland also received the 2005 Mark Twain Award, given by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry. Graywolf Press published a collection of Hoagland's essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, in 2006.
Tony Hoagland's poems have been described as moving unerringly with wit and irony, like an arrow through its target—we, the readers—with exhilarating results. His poems sprint across the page and unexpectedly blow apart a single moment, exposing its contradictory nature—and often our folly.Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshingly intelligent. Steven Cramer writes of Hoagland's poems, "[they] grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they also consider the mysteries of the national identity—how the social and the personal mutually impinge."
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Eamon Grennan (Residency #13; October 13 – November 2)
Eamon Grennan’s volumes of poetry are Wildly for Days (1983), What Light There Is (1987), What Light There Is & Other Poems (1989), As If It Matters (1991), So It Goes (1995), Selected and New Poems (2000), Still Life with Waterfall (2001) and The Quick of It ( 2005) Other publications include Leopardi: Selected Poems (1997), and Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century, a collection of essays on modern Irish poetry. Among his grants and prizes in the US are awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Leopardi: Selected Poems received the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Still Life with Waterfall was the recipient of the 2003 Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Poets. His poems have been awarded a number of Pushcart prizes. He taught from 1974 to 2007 at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English. Now retired from Vassar, he teaches in the graduate writing programs of NYU and Columbia. He divides his time between the US and the West of Ireland. |
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