This month, Riverviews is excited to welcome three wonderfully talented writers currently in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts:
Nancy K. Barry is both a teacher and a writer of creative nonfiction at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival. Her essays have appeared in Iowa Woman, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, and for several years she contributed radio essays to Iowa Public Radio. She is the author of the one-woman play, Lessons from Cancer College, performed in the Midwest in 2010, and funded in part by a grant from the Iowa Arts Council. She has been a guest at two Minnesota residencies: The Anderson Center in Red Wing and the Collegeville Institute, and is spending this month as a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, working on a nonfiction essay about one of the earliest social workers in America, Lillian Wald, who founded the Visiting Nurses Society and the Henry Street Settlement in the lower east side of Manhattan.
Jessica Garratt’s book Fire Pond won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Utah Press in 2009. She earned her PhD at the University of Missouri, and in last spring held a visiting teaching appointment at Wichita State University. She has received fellowships from the Carson McCullers Center, MacDowell Colony, ART342, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. Jessica’s poems have appeared in journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, Literary Imagination, and new work is forthcoming in Western Humanities Review and Colorado Review. She is currently a writer-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where she is working on her second book of poems.
Elizabeth Poliner is the author of Mutual Life & Casualty, a novel-in-stories, and Sudden Fog, and chabpook of poems. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Laurel Review. She’s been awarded seven grants in fiction from the D.C. Commission on the Arts (and one in poetry), and has been a fiction scholar at both the Sewannee and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. She teaches in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Hollins University’s Jackson Center for Creative Writing. While she’s at VCCA this month, she’s working on a novel.
