2017 Writers

Leland Kinsey

Leland Kinsey was born and raised on a farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where his ancestors settled in the early 1800s. He conducted writing workshops for the Vermont Arts Council and the Children’s Literacy Foundation at over 100 schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. Leland worked as a farmer, printer, and horse trainer, and wrote seven collections of poetry.  Kinsey passed away September 14, 2016 of lymphoma. Before he died, he was working on a new book of poems, The Last Correspondence,  which Green Writers Press will publish in May.

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Ellen Bryant Voigt grew up on a farm in Virginia, and has lived for many years in Vermont, where she founded Goddard College’s ground-breaking low-residency MFA program.  She has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently, Headwaters (W.W. Norton, 2013.) Appointed Vermont State Poet from 1999-2003, Voigt is also a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was awarded the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets and, most recently, the MacArthur Foundation.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University. His most recent book, Scribbled in the Dark: Poems (Harper Collins) came out in June.