2021 Faculty

2021 Faculty

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (poetry)

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of the collection Cenzontle (2018), which won the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize, and the chapbook Dulce (2018). His memoir, Children of the Land, is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020. His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, People Magazine en Español, The Paris Review, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He currently teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University.

Martha Collins (poetry)

Martha Collins’s tenth book of poetry, Because What Else Could I Do, was published by the University of Pittsburgh in fall 2019. Her previous volumes include Admit One: An American Scrapbook, White Papers, and the book-length poem Blue Front, as well as the paired volumes Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day. Collins has also published four volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at U.Mass.-Boston and former Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, she currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Porochista Khakpour (nonfiction)

Porochista Khakpour is the author of two novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007), a 2007 California Book Award winner and The last Illusion (2014), and Sick: A Memoir (2018). Her other writing (essays, features, reviews, cover stories, and columns) have appeared in or are forthcoming in Harper’s, Slate, Salon, Al Jazeera America, Vice, GQ, Guernica, Rumpus, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, among others. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose).
She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and more.

She is a literary criticism columnist for The Virginia Quarterly Review, contributing editor at The Offing, and The Evergreen Review.

Jess Row (fiction)

Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine, two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and a book of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Tin House, and many other venues, and has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a Whiting Writers Award. He teaches at the College of New Jersey and lives in New York City.

Schedule

2021 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival Schedule

June 23–26, 2021

Day 1: Wednesday, June 23
9–11 a.m. EST: Introductory intensive with Megan Stielstra (workshop participants only)
11:10-11:30 a.m. EST: Director's welcome from Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
1–2:15 p.m. EST: Panel “Who is Where You Are: Narrative and Personal Place-Making”
3–5 p.m. EST: First workshop
6 p.m. EST: Faculty Reading: Jess Row, Martha Collins

Day 2: Thursday, June 24
10 a.m.–12 p.m. EST: Second workshop
2 p.m. EST: DaMaris Hill Keynote & Conversation
6 p.m. EST: Faculty Reading: Porochista Khakpour, Marcelo Hernandez-Castillo

Day 3: Friday, June 25
10 a.m.–12 p.m. EST: Third workshop
1–2:15 p.m. EST: Panel: “Interior Landscapes: Reinventions of the Lyric”
6 p.m. EST: Community Reading

Day 4: Saturday, June 26
10–11:15 a.m. EST: Panel: “Valuing the Personal: An Engaged Creative Writing Pedagogy”
1–3 p.m. EST: Final Workshop
3:30 p.m. EST: Festival farewell

Registration

2021 Registration Options

Institutions hoping to sponsor the attendance of their undergraduate or graduate students may do so at discounted registration rates. Contact Emily Carpenter at ecarpenter@chq.org to learn more.

Standard Registration: $350 (deadline May 31)
Includes four workshop meetings with a small group of no more than 12 writers, an introductory intensive with all workshop groups combined, an individual consultation with your workshop faculty member, and all components of Explorations Registration.

Explorations Registration: $200
Includes faculty readings, a community reading, the keynote address and panel discussions.

Director

Chautauqua Writers' Festival Director

Originally from Buffalo, Dr. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, chosen by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2010 Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen, 2016) and Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017). Travesty Generator, winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Award, is forthcoming from Noemi in 2019.

Bertram is a 2014 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

She can be contacted about Festival-related matters at writersfestival@chq.org.

The founding directors of the Writers' Festival were Diana Hume George, George Looney and Philip Terman.

Past Faculty

Fiction Faculty

Nonfiction Faculty

Poetry Faculty

Keynotes, Panelists and Breakout Leaders

• Meg Day
• Devin Donovan
• Kate Glavin
• Jimin Han
• Nicole Homer
• Linda Lowen
• Maria Maldonado
• Susannah Nevison
• Jillian Powers
• Kenyatta Rogers
• Mike Scalise
• Mathias Svalina
• Jim Tobin