Millay Colony | Juries

Each year, professionals in the fields of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, composing, visual arts and theater meet, in subject juries, to select residents for the Millay Colony. The process is 100% anonymous—and we don't release information about our juries until all decisions have been made for the coming year.

Poetry Jury : 2008 Season

G.E. Patterson was a featured poet-performer in New York's Panasonic Village Jazz Fest and a decorated veteran of the slam-poetry scene. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Tug (Graywolf Press) and To and From (Ahsahta Press, 2008).

His writing can be found in several magazines and anthologies, including Blues Poetry, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Poetry 180, Isn't It Romantic, Open City, Swerve, Seneca Review, and Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics. He currently teaches in the graduate program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Rebecca Wolff is the author of two books of poems, Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004). She is the founding editor and publisher of the literary journal Fence and its publishing arm, Fence Books, as well as of The Constant Critic, a monthly poetry-review website. She teaches at the New School and was a Writer in Residence at the University of Idaho, Boise. Born and raised in New York City, she has relocated up the Hudson River as far as Athens with her husband, the novelist Ira Sher, and their two children, Asher and Margot.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of Voluntary Servitude, (Graywolf Press, 2004) and The Anchorage, which received the 1999 Lambda Literary Award. He has received several fellowships, and his poems have been widely anthologized. He teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont, and is a member of the faculty of the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He lives in Catskill, New York.

Prose Jury : 2008 Season

Taha Ebrahimi will be graduating with her M.F.A. in 2008 from the University of Pittsburgh's creative nonfiction writing program where she also teaches.

She has written for The Seattle Times, Creative Nonfiction, and Pittsburgh Professional Magazine, as well as won awards from the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and Bellingham Review's Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She has been in residence at both The Millay Colony for the Arts and Hedgebrook. She is also a contributor to Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, forthcoming from Norton in 2008. She is currently working on Among the Sufis: An Iranian-American's Search to Understand Islam in the West, about being the first outsider to live with Islamic Sufi women in the U.K., The Netherlands, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, and Turkey.

Renee Gladman lives in Providence, RI, where she publishes Leon Works, a press for experimental fiction and cross-genre writing. She is the author of three collections of prose (Juice, The Activist, and Newcomer Can't Swim) and one poetry book (A Picture-Feeling), and teaches in the Program for Literary Arts at Brown University.

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003 and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year 2003.

Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and Isn't It Romantic? (Verse Press), among other compilations. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she edits her own magazine, Explosive, and serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence magazine. Her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo (2001; 2004; 2005) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005-2006), and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Program.

Carole Maso is the author of nine books including the novels Ava, The Art Lover, and Defiance; a collection of essays, Break Every Rule; prose poems, Aureole and Beauty Is Convulsive; and a memoir, The Room Lit By Roses. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and is currently at work on two projects, Mother & Child, a book of stories, and The Bay of Angels, a novel.

Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, and critic. His books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography and an Edgar Award; Doubles; and A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. The recipient of Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim fellowships, Robert Polito has been Director of the Graduate Writing Program at The New School since 1992.

Justin Tussing is the author of the novel The Best People in the World. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, and nerve.com. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received fellowships from the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lannan Foundation. He teaches at the University of Southern Maine, where he directs the Stonecoast Writers' Conference.

Visual Arts Jury : 2008 Season

Neil Goldberg has been exhibiting his video and mixed media work since 1992 at venues including The Museum of Modern Art (where it was recently acquired for the permanent collection); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; The New Museum of Contemporary Art; The Wexner Center for the Arts; The Hammer Museum; The Kitchen; The New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center; The Pacific Film Archive; The Jewish Museum; Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt; Neue Gesellschaft fuer bildende Kunst Berlin; El Centro de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo Mexico City; and the British Film Institute. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Experimental Television Center, CEC ArtsLink, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. He graduated from Brown University in 1986 with a degree in history and computer science.

Mary-Kay Lombino is The Emily Hargroves Fisher '57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She has also served as Curator of Exhibitions at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach and Assistant Curator at UCLA Hammer Museum. She received her BA in Art History from the University of Richmond and an MA in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Southern California. Her group exhibitions include Utopian Mirage: Social Metaphors in Contemporary Photography and Film; Off the Shelf: New Forms in Contemporary Artists' Books; UnNaturally; and By Hand: Pattern Precision, and Repetition in Contemporary Drawing. She has organized solo shows for numerous artists including Phil Collins, Mungo Thomson, Candida Höfer, Ken Price, Amy Myers, Gay Outlaw, Brad Spence, Euan Macdonald, Alice Könitz, and Bob Knox. Ms. Lombino was a recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2005 and was awarded First Place for curating the Best Exhibition of an Emerging or Under-known Artist selected by the International Art Critics Association in 2003. The same year, she was selected by The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Exhibitions to represent the United States in the Cuenca Bienal, with a major international exhibition that took place in Ecuador in Spring 2004.

Ivana Mestrovic is the Director of Spacetime C.C. the studio of sculptor Mark di Suvero. She coordinates his exhibitions and large scale installations in galleries, museums and cities throughout the world. She is a founding board member of Socrates Sculpture Park, an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that was founded by Mark di Suvero in 1986 and, to date, has exhibited the work of over 700 artists. She was the co-editor with Alyson Baker, the Director of Socrates Sculpture Park, of a book chronicling the Park's 20 year history and is currently editing an artist book by Mark di Suvero. She is also the Director of the Athena Foundation, a foundation that awards grants to artists and arts organizations to assist them in the production and exhibition of new work.

Frances Richard is a writer, editor, and educator. Her book, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003. As an art critic, Richard has contributed to magazines including Artforum, Bomb, and The London Review of Books, and to exhibition catalogues produced by institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Creative Time, Inc., and Independent Curators International. Richard is a member of the editorial team at Cabinet, a founding editor of the literary journal Fence, and teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005 she curated and edited, with Jeffey Kastner and Sina Najafi, an exhibition and accompanying catalogue titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estates." She lives in Brooklyn.

Jack Shear moved from Los Angeles to Upstate New York to work with Ellsworth Kelly in 1984. Collaborating closely with the artist, he has consulted on every exhibition and catalogue that has been produced of his work since that time. He is and has been Director, Secretary and Treasurer of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation since its inception in 1991.

Jack has worked as a photographer for over 25 years, primarily in a medium format and concentrating on black and white portraiture. His artwork has been included in a number of one-person and group exhibitions. In 1985 Twelvetrees Press published a monographic collection of Jack's portraits.

He had his first one-person museum show in 1996 at Williams College Art Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, entitled Short Season. Jack's work has appeared in a number of publications, as diverse as Rolling Stone, ArtForum, and New York Magazine and is included in private collections and museums such as The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. As a curator, Jack produced and designed an exhibition at the Shaker Museum and Library consisting of Shaker photographs from the collection. He also co-curated an exhibition entitled Drawn from Artists' Collections with Ann Philbin, Director of the Hammer Museum, at the Drawing Center in New York City and which traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2006 Jack co-curated Twice Drawn at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, curator, and visual artist. He has worked in several media and disciplines including film and video, music recording, theater, painting and drawing. He is the author of one published collection of poems, Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); and is co-author of a image-text collaboration with author/translator/professor John Keene, Seismosis (1913 press, 2006), which features Stackhouse's drawings in dialogue with Keene's texts. His visual art has been exhibited in galleries and exhibition spaces, including Wilmer Jennings Gallery (NYC) and White Box: The Annex (NYC). He is a Cave Canem Writer Fellow; a 2005 Fellow in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts, was a panel/juror for the 2007 Fellowship in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, MFA in Writing candidate, 2009. He will present a talk as a Visiting Artist to both writers and visual artists at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's 2007-2008 Workspace Artists-in-Residence program in March 2008. A forthcoming essay on form and experimentation in poetry will be published by the Academy of American Poets, in their print magazine American Poet, in the spring 2008 issue.

Theater Jury : 2008 Season

Kara Lee Corthron's play Like a Cow or an Elephant was awarded the 2007 Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights and was produced at the DePaul Theatre School in Chicago in May. Kara recently received the 2007 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights for her play Wild Black-Eyed Susans. She is a recipient of a 2007-2008 EST/Sloan Commission. She was also the winner of the 2006 New Professional Theatre Writer's Award, was nominated for the 2007 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, is a three-time recipient of Lincoln Center's Lecomte du Nouy Foundation Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2007 Sundance Theatre Lab. Kara's plays have been developed with CenterStage (Baltimore), Circle East, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Voice & Vision, and Julliard. Her one-act, Cave Krewe, was produced in October at Manhattan Theatre Source and will be published in Book of Estrogenius 2006, to be released next fall. Kara is a 2006 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Julliard School. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and Blue Roses Theatre Company.

Jeffrey Jones is the author of 70 Scenes of Halloween, Nightcoil, a series of collage plays (Der Inka Von Peru, Tomorrowland & Wipeout), a series of Crazy Plays, A Man's Best Friend, Stone Monkey Banished (an adaptation of Monkey for Ralph Lee), 12 Brothers (an adaptation of the Grimm Bros. Tale, with Camila Jones), and two musicals, Write If You Get Work (score: Dan Moses Schreier) and J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation (score: Jonathan Larson). His plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing and Sun & Moon Press. He also is co-curator of OBIE-winning series, Little Theatre, and holds an annual Pataphysics workshop at the Flea. He maintains a blog devoted to playwriting theory at http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com. Mr. Jones has received NEA, NYSCA and NYFA Playwriting fellowships, Bay Area Playwrights Festival and Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowships, and support from the NEA Opera/Music Theatre & Interarts Programs, The Rockefeller Foundation, ArtMatters and the Peg Santvoord Foundation. He was a member of New Dramatists from 1980 to 1987, and a MacDowell colonist in 1991 and 2000. He has been a site evaluator for the NEA Theatre Program since 1984, a panelist for the Brooklyn Council on the Arts, Massachusetts Council on the Arts, Vermont Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, ArtsConnection, New England Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation; a cultural commissioner of the City of Hartford; a consultant for FEDAPT; and a lecturer at Princeton, Brown, the University of Iowa, New York University, Wheaton, Hamilton, and the Yale School of Drama. He also teaches as part of the Pataphysics program at the Flea.

Theater Jury > Screenwriting

Ana Trainer Anastasia Traina is a screenwriter and director. She recently sold her screenplay Horton Bliss to Sony with Mark Gordon and Katalyst producing. Her screenplay The Glass Tank, had its premiere reading at the Columbia County film festival in October 2004. In 2003, Ana wrote Pack of Rats, a one-hour episode for Street Time for Sony Pictures Television and Showtime.

Ana's play In Audela received a reading at the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts in London and was directed by George Washington University theatre fellow Allan Wade in the spring of 2005. In 2002 Circle East produced Mermaids on the Hudson at the Chasama Theatre and When Heaven and Earth at Manhattan Theatre Source. Winny and G, produced by the Love Creek Theater, was a finalist for the Jane Chambers' Awards in 1997 and then published by Heinemann in the 1999 Anthology of Women Playwrights. Other plays and monologues are published by Smith & Krauss.

From 1999 to 2003, Ana headed the literary department at Circle East and also served as the curator for the Full Circle Festival. She is currently working on her new play entitled Seagulls on Sullivan Street and two new screenplays.

Composing Jury : 2008 Season

Stephen Dankner received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition from the Juilliard School in 1971. A list of works since 1990 includes eight symphonies, nine string quartets, six concerti (two for piano, one for violin, two for cello and alto saxophone); three major song cycles; sonatas for violin (2), piano, alto saxophone, cello; three piano trios; a piano quartet; five orchestral tone poems; background environmental music for the New Orleans Aquarium of the Americas, film scores. He has released seven CD recordings on the Albany, Centaur, Gasparo and Romeo labels.

Second Symphony, Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra and other works published by Ries & Erler, Berlin, Germany.

Commissioned orchestral works have been performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Longwood Symphony, Laredo Philharmonic as well as several others in the United States. He was commissioned by the Nürnberg Symphoniker to compose a work for their 60th anniversary season, 2006. Dankner was visiting composer, Aspen Music Festival, 1994. Composer-in-Residence for "Faith Partners" residency sponsored by a grant from the American Composers Forum, 2001. Five commissions for the Albany Symphony, 2004-08. Premiere performances of his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were given by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra during the 2006/07 seasons. Dankner is the composer-in-residence with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. He was appointed to this post in 2004.

The composer has twice been a recipient of a State of Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in Music Composition (1986, 1998). State of Louisiana Division of the Arts Mini-Grants (4 - 1998-2004). Winner, William Lincer International Composition Award for Piano Quartet (2001), residencies at Yaddo the Virginia Center for Creative Arts; A Studio In The Woods, and The Millay Colony. He is the recipient of a Surdna Arts Teacher's Fellowship to compose his Eighth Symphony (2004-'05).

Samita Sinha sings North Indian classical music fused with electronics, jazz, and text in multiple languages. She began her training at age ten in Flushing, the same time she began singing in choirs and musicals.

After studying Literature and Cultural Criticism at Yale, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study Hindustani vocal music in the guru-student tradition with Dr. Alka Deo Marulkar in Goa, India.

Her current projects include an electro-Hindustani/ hip-hop project called Anatomy in collaboration with pianist/ producer Marc Cary, which has been expanded into a multimedia music performance piece entitled Naked. In 2006 her music collective Kaash released their debut album Seep listed as one of Billboard's Top 5 Hear and Now and named a 2006 Top Pick by All About Jazz. Samita sings with jazz ensembles such as Marc Cary's FOCUS and Sunny Jain Collective, and is a featured vocalist in performance poet Sekou Sundiata's music-theater work, the 51st (dream) state, which premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music and continues to tour internationally. She lives in Queens.