Writers'
Workshop
For more than 20 years, Williston’s Writers’ Workshop Series has brought celebrated authors to campus to teach, share insights on the writing process, and inspire the next generation of writers. We’ve hosted screen writers, poets, editors, novelists, journalists, and memoirists, including multiple winners of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. For students in the Writers’ Workshop class, the trimester involves the study of a visiting author, culminating in a master class and community-wide reading. Read an article about the 20th anniversary of the Writers’ Workshop.
2022-23 Writers' Workshop Presenters
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Bianca Stone
September 26
Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City where she received her MFA from New York University in 2009. She is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House, 2014), Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours (Pleiades, 2016), The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018) and the children’s book A Little Called Pauline, with text by Gertrude Stein. She collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated Antigonick, a book of Carson’s translation of Antigone (New Directions, 2012). Her poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review and many others. She has returned to Vermont with her husband and collaborator, the poet Ben Pease, where she is director of programs for The Ruth Stone House, a literary nonprofit artist residency, letterpress studio, and community poetry center.
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Major Jackson
October 24
Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and Zyzzva. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
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Martín Espada
November 7
Martín Espada has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems from Norton is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Kelly Link
December 5
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter, dog, and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.
A Selection of Past Presenters
Colum McCann
Irish-born journalist and novelist Colum McCann discussed his National-Book-Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin with classes, and made the case for reading’s being a gateway to empathy.
Anita Shreve
The late best-selling author of The Pilot’s Wife and The Weight of Water—a parent of two Williston graduates—Anita Shreve spoke to students about her stories that describe “life intensely felt.”
Jennifer duBois
Award-winning writer Jennifer duBois ’02 has twice led workshops at Williston, first with her acclaimed debut novel A Partial History of Lost Causes, and then for its follow-up, the “psychologically astute” Cartwheel.
Nic Stone
New York Times best-selling author Nic Stone discussed her debut novel Dear Martin, whose protagonist opens a literary dialogue with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her second novel is Odd One Out.
Mo Willems
Mo Willems P’19 told his Williston audience that he writes “incomprehensible books for illiterates,” which was his way of saying that the pigeon and other iconic characters he’s invented are co-created by his readers.
Richard Russo
Richard Russo’s Pulitzer-Prizing-winning novel Empire Falls is “grounded,” says New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, “in the New England bedrock of class-bound fatalism.”
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Past Visiting Writers by Year
2021
Rachel Cerrotti
Ross Gay
Colson Whitehead
Chen Chen2019
Debra Immergut
Jim Shepard
Manuel Gonzales
April Bernard2018
Dr. Roger Reeves
Naomi Jackson
Jen Acker
Karen Shepard2017
Madeleine Blais P’00, ’04
Timothy Donnelly
Colum McCann
Nic Stone2016
Steve Bloom
Keri Smith
Laura Tillman
Andy Ward2015
Ian Cheney
John Katzenbach P’00, ’04
David Maraniss
Debra Monroe2014
George Colt
Jennifer duBois
Anne Fadiman
Joan Wickersham2013
Elinor Lipman P’00
Rebecca Makkai
Patricia McCormick
Mary Jo Salter2012
Christopher Benfey
Jennifer duBois ’02
Anita Shreve
Mo Willems2011
Lynne Barrett
Andre Dubus III
Nikky Finney
Alison Pace1998-2010
Anita Shreve
Anthony Giardin
Arthur Golden
Augusten Burroughs
Bill Littlefield
Bret Lott
Cammie McGovern
Cathleen Schine
Chic Eglee
Chris Bohjalian
Curtis Sittenfeld
Daniel Jones
David Huddle
David Stern
Deborah Monroe
Elinor Lipman
Elizabeth Alexander
Frederick Reiken
Gregory Maguire
Helen Fremont
James Tate
Jill McCorkle
Joan Wickersham
Jodi Picoult
John Edgar Weideman
John Katzenbach
John Marks
Jonathan Harr
Joseph Ellis
Joseph Nocera
Kevin Sweeney
Kurt Brown
Laure-Anne Bosselaire
Les Standiford
Madeleine Blais
Mameve Medwed
Martín Espada
Mary Jo Salter
Meg Wolitzer
Nora Raleigh Baskin
Pam Houston
Peter Smith
Philip Caputo
Richard Russo
Robert Meeropol
Roland Merullo
Seabastian Stuart
Stacy Schiff
Sue Miller
Susan Snively
Suzanne Strempek Shea
Thomas French
Tom Perrotta
Tracy Kidder
Wally Lamb
Wyn Cooper
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