Alumni News Archive

RED GIRL JUMPING, an experimental memoir about traumatic amnesia written from the point of view of memory itself (and from inside a Wurlitzer casita) won the 2024 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel from JEF Press and is available from JEF press or Amazon Books.

<i>In McClintock’s Corn</i>, written by Carolyn Gage and directed by Helen Rynaski, tells the compelling story of Barbara McClintock. How does a brilliant geneticist, ostracized for being female and labeled “sexually deviant,” persevere and ultimately win a Nobel Prize?

<b>Wildflower Playhouse</b> (Taos, NM)
Jan. 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31 @ 7PM.
Jan. 25 and Feb. 1 @ 2PM

Flamenco guitarist and composer Gustavo Alonso López is set to release his third full-length studio album, Sonanta Con Metales, in April of 2026. Pre-Orders are available now. Created in collaboration with trumpeter Jay Roulston, this new project presents the Flamenco guitar in the context of a brass ensemble. Drawing on an array of influences ranging from Flamenco to Jazz, film music, and Minimalism, López’s latest received special support from Artist Trust, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation. Click the links below to learn more:

The biannual Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize has opened its 2026 nomination cycle. Artist and author Paul Bartlett Ré is recognized internationally for promoting world peace and harmony through his creative work. For five decades, the Albuquerque resident has demonstrated how serene and uplifting art can serve as a model for living and inspire individuals to cultivate inner depth and express it outwardly through meaningful action.

In this spirit, the Peace Prize is awarded to a University of New Mexico faculty or staff member, student, alumnus, volunteer or retiree who has best promoted peace, harmony and understanding among people of the world—both internally and through tangible contributions. These efforts may occur at the local, regional, national or global level. The prize emphasizes the pursuit of internal and external peace and encourages thoughtful discussion of what peace truly entails.

The recipient may be an artist but may also come from any field, provided they have pursued peace and harmony with creativity and dedication. Potential projects may involve environmental work, social or individual healing, integrative medicine, sustainable energy or green architectural design, art creation or preservation, family planning or population initiatives, or any positive endeavor. The prize includes Conflict Resolution, with a strong emphasis on Conflict Prevention.

The award consists of a cash prize to help the recipient carry forward their work, commemorative artwork by Paul Ré and specially inscribed copies of Ré’s acclaimed books The Dance of the Pencil and Art, Peace, and Transcendence. His most recent volume, Art, Peace, and Transcendence: Réograms that Elevate and Unite, received the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Philosophy and is available through UNM Press.

Nominations must be submitted electronically and received no later than 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, for consideration for the May 21, 2026 award.

For nomination forms and additional information about the prize, visit paulre.org/peace.


To view Paul Ré’s work, explore
The Dance of the Pencil and Art, Peace, and Transcendence: Réograms that Elevate and Unite

Mary Gilliland’s new poetry book from The Bodily Press (Amherst MA) is <i>Red Tide at Sandy Bend</i>.
Barnacles sparkle, puffins glint, human practices result in fish-strewn beaches. Like blue-green algae on lakes and ponds, red tide is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Nourished by human waste and warming waters, cyanobacteria multiply in harmful algal blooms (HABs) that release neurotoxins. In a whirl of games, addictions, concussions, swimming bans, <i>Red Tide at Sandy Bend</i> posits a world of creaturely interdependence visceral and intimate.
One reader says "It is beautiful, haunting, all of a piece. The scientific truths, facts, words—many unknown perhaps to many of us readers—add a melancholy note often but they do not overwhelm. There is revelation and dream and perspectives, softness of the human soul as well as the natural world.
This new book can be ordered from the publisher or at select independent bookstores. To inquire about signed copies, contact me directly at mg24@cornell.edu or through my website.

My debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize, was released on October 7th.
Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament for the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by the existential question about the poet-speaker’s oral mother tongue, Tamang: how do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, arbitrariness, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and illegibility embodied by “X,” the book hovers on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from school children’s perspective reveals how a war can permanently scar the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a “reverse-elegy” for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.

Additional Recognitions for the Book:
Finalist, National Poetry Series Open Competition 2021, 2024
Finalist, Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize 2022
Finalist, Alice James Award 2024
Finalist, Jake Adam York Prize 2021, 2023
Finalist, Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Poetry Contest 2023
Finalist, Michael Waters Poetry Prize 2024 (withdrawn)
Finalist, Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize 2024 (withdrawn)
Finalist, Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry 2024 (withdrawn)
Honorable Mention, Vanderbilt University Literary Prize 2024

Shows are selling out for the world premier of "Just Add Water"! Written by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik, "Just Add Water" explores the Great Salt Lake's essence through a whimsical cli-fi dramedy. Directed by Penelope Caywood, it combines humor and ecological grief, highlighting kinship with nature and prompting audience reflection on environmental stewardship amidst haunting performances and engaging theatricality.
Follow the link below to read the full review by Rhetorical Review.

I’m thrilled to announce that my new book of poems, Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House, is available for pre-order at a 20% discount from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (link below). Once the book appears in early December, it'll be for sale at Bookshop.com and other online booksellers, and as an Ebook from Sheila-Na-Gig. I’ll also offer signed copies via my website.
I hope you’ll consider not just ordering a copy, but also spreading the news in whatever ways you think best, whether to potentially interested readers, reading series coordinators, teachers, acquisitions librarians, or local bookstores. Either in-person or remotely, I’d welcome the chance to give readings or interviews, visit classes or community workshops, do book signings, or give talks about poetry, fiction, or digital collage.
Thanks in advance for your interest and support.
Best,
John Repp

I will be opening a show @5.gallery in Santa Fe on Saturday October 11. The opening will be from noon to 5, so if you’re in the area please stop by.

My new book of translations of contemporary Chinese poet Zhang Zao (1962–2010) has just been published by Zephyr Press:
Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao, Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. A bilingual edition with my introduction and an afterword by Bei Dao. Link below.
This marks the concluding volume (and my fourth) in the Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry.

We are thrilled to announce that HWF alum Claire Downes Whitehurst is currently showcasing her work in the group exhibition, Unspoken Language of Colors, at Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia. This exhibition, running from September 12 to November 1, 2025, delves into the emotional and symbolic resonance of color through the eyes of contemporary artists.
Claire's contributions to the exhibition include several porcelain works—Prismatic Rain, Anne's Caladiums, Swamp Mallow, Sudden Blue, and Morning Sickness—several of which were created during her HWF residency. These pieces exemplify her unique approach to color and form, inviting viewers to experience the nuanced language of hues and textures.
The exhibition opens with a reception and artists' dialogue on Friday, September 12, from 6 to 8 PM, with the dialogue from 6 to 6:30 PM. Pentimenti Gallery is located at 145 N 2nd St, Philadelphia, PA.

Alumni composer Jerome Kitzke completed this work during his residency at HWF last fall. This October, it will be presented in New York City.
The World Premiere of I Wonder If This Ground Has Anything to Say (A Treaty Illumination)
Music and Libretto by Jerome Kitzke
Commissioned and performed by thingNY, Presented by Tribeca New Music, thingNY, and the Kaufman Music Center
📍 Merkin Hall, 129 W. 67th St., New York City
🗓 Thursday, October 16, 2025 · 7:30 p.m.

We’re proud to share Plaza Blanca, a new solo exhibition by Alba Suau, on view at Palau de Casavells (Spain) through August 31.
Rooted in meditative walks through the high desert of northern New Mexico, Suau’s recent works are subtle, atmospheric studies in memory, perception, and place. Her layered canvases—created with oil, acrylic, pastel, and casein—capture the quiet rhythms, mineral hues, and sculptural formations of this evocative landscape.
These paintings do not simply depict terrain, they evoke it as lived, remembered, and transformed experience.

In 1984, Paul Ré created Compositions for Classical Guitar, a 45-minute recording that blends his original music with an introduction to his traveling exhibit Touchable Art for the Blind and Sighted, which reached over 100,000 people across North America. Praised by editor Sue Tullos in The Log of the Bridgetender for its mood and precision, the recording features three evocative pieces—Waves, Yearning, and Rising Currents—influenced by classical jazz, Flamenco, Native American chants, and Eastern rhythms. Now digitally remastered in high-quality MP3, the album includes cover art featuring Réograms such as The Blues Rising in Peace (2024) and Wave Dreaming It Is a Shell (2012), featured in the award-winning book Art, Peace, and Transcendence. The album’s philosophy aligns with the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize, founded in 2006 to promote peace through the arts, science and diverse disciplines. Listen to the album and see the cover art at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lcvBP042VZsn1AgqUlZ6ZVS0penxvKzNY.
During his 1984 residency, Paul did a recital of these works at the Wurlitzer Foundation.

I’m excited to announce a National Indie Excellence Award (NIEA) for best Comics/Graphic Novel for “My Book of the Dead: a memoir”!
You can get it at Bookbaby or Amazon. Or order from your local bookstore!
If you know of anyone who might be interested, please forward this info. And if you're inspired to post a review, it will be much appreciated!
Best,
Kathleen

Last week I was accepted into the artist residency program at the Ucross Foundation for Fall of 2025. This retreat-style residency is located near the town of Sheridan, Wyoming, in a beautiful mountainous setting. I’d like to send a sincere thank you to Ucross for supporting the continued development of my creative practice. I’d also like to thank the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation for the support they’ve given and for helping me build the momentum needed to secure this new fellowship.<br />

I’m eager to announce the publication of <i>As If This Light</i>, a free-for-viewing-and/or-download Buttonhook Press chapbook of “experimental discourse.” If the items collected here bring you even one percent of the fun I had making them, As If This Light will have done its work.

New song “THE ONE” is out and streaming everywhere! Please listen, share, save…all that good stuff. Your support sincerely makes our worlds go round.<br><br>The lyrics to “The One” were initially a long cowboy poem that I had written in an hour or so out on a friend’s back porch in the Tennessee August heat. Like many of my odd and winding Western lyrics, I never could find the right melody to tie it all together, so I had more or less tossed it out. Then when Tyler and I started working together, I was sifting through old song seeds to bring to our write and dug this one up. I sent it to him and asked him how he would sing it, without any context of what I had been previously strumming and humming. The voice memo he sent back made me squeal— the melody and guitar were so much more modern and sweeping than what I would’ve ever come up with having held onto the words for so long. He cut out a couple extra verses to trim the fat and I wrote a chorus. The first time we sang it together as a duet felt like magic.<br><br>https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-one-single/1812332698

It’s been eight years since I first began writing Clam Down, and now I’m finally ready to share the finished book with you. In the words of my favorite marathonist, Shizo Kanakuri, “It was a long trip.” Along the way, I got a job, got married, and had a kid—-he’s almost three! Now going to bed is the most exciting prospect of the day. But I think I’ve gained some insights that might speak to our current times of crisis and retreat. “To clam or not to clam?” This was the post-it note I taped on my computer. If we instinctively close up when we’re feeling scared and overwhelmed, how can we begin to open up again?<br><br>Clam Down is a "memoir" about a woman who turns into a clam in the aftermath of her divorce, after her mom repeatedly texts her to "clam down." Clamming has been the family's tried-and-true method for survival, and the clam decides to go on a quest to learn more about her true species. She wants to find out whether there’s a cost to embracing isolation and invisibility. This book is a genealogical accounting of clamhood, starting with the family unit and extending beyond, to other artists and writers and scientists and even invasive Asian clams. The story ends with her dad revealing why he had to leave the family for a decade to write his top-secret accounting software, Shell Computing.<br><br>In many ways, this book was co-created with my family, who endured years of endless pestering with egoless patience. At first, I thought my dad had said (warned? threatened?) “don't betray me,” but later he insisted that he’d said, "don't betray yourself." He wanted me to tell the story my way. I hope that I managed to, as he would put it, "extend the historical feeling," and "add compassion" for the immigrant experience. This is a book for those of us who are always weighing the pros and cons of speaking out, torn between caution and circumspection and freedom. What is required of us in this historical moment? What is the best way to thrive?<br><br>In case any of this sounds interesting to you, the pre-order link is below, or you might also request a copy from your library!<br><br>My very best to you,<br><br>Anelise

We’re thrilled to share that Rita has been named a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her electrifying novel, HEADSHOT.<br><br>Described as “brilliant” by The Atlantic and a “hard-punching novel” by NPR, HEADSHOT tells the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the U.S., unfolding over two days of a championship tournament. Structured as a series of fierce, intimate face-offs, this is a bold and unforgettable portrait of physical competition and radical girlhood.<br><br>We couldn’t be prouder of you, Rita Bullwinkel!!<br><br>Headshot Photo Credit: Jenna Garrett

Cyrus Cassells has been awarded the <b>2025 Jackson Poetry Prize</b>, one of the nation’s most prestigious honors for an American poet. Presented annually by Poets & Writers, the prize recognizes exceptional literary talent and includes a $100,000 award.<br><br>Judges James Richardson, Patricia Spears Jones, and Chase Twichell praised Cassells’s work as:<br><br><i>“Painterly, precise, simultaneously strange and utterly familiar… In a world that is increasingly unstable, the brave compassion of these poems, both profound and hard won, is a rare and precious thing.”</i><br><br>Cassells’s inventive, lyrical language continues to move and inspire:<br><br><i>“Coal-dark and stillborn grapes,” “a hurrah of wheeling blackbirds,” “the choir of cliffs.”</i><br><br>Unlike most prizes, the Jackson Poetry Prize has no application process—poets are nominated by a panel of peers and selected by some of the country’s most distinguished voices in poetry.<br><br>Photo credit: Eyoel Kahssay

HWF alumna Tirtza Even, alongside collaborator Nadav Assor, is opening <i>Chronicle of a Fall</i> at Bates College, Maine, as part of the Impact 21st program. The feature-length immersive installation explores the experiences of six immigrant cultural workers from the Middle East, Africa, and the Global South, using body cameras and 3D laser scanning to create a fragmented yet interconnected space. The exhibition runs from April 3 to May 2, 2025.<br />
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Beyond this installation, Tirtza has been developing <i>Disturbed</i>, a series of multichannel installations capturing the emotional impact of climate change through digital disruptions and personal testimonies. The project’s first segment was recorded during her <b>Winter 2023 residency at HWF</b>, followed by a second in Louisiana. Future segments are planned for Alaska (Summer 2025) and additional locations through 2027.<br />
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Following her Alaska shoot, Tirtza will spend five weeks at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency in Captiva, Florida, editing the first sections of <i>Disturbed</i>.<br />
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If you're on the East Coast this spring, stop by <i>Chronicle of a Fall</i> at Bates College!

My new novel, The Imagined Life, will be published by Knopf in April 2025.

Just dropping a short note to share that the "MEMORY PIECE" paperback is out this month! If you’ve already read "MEMORY PIECE", thank you! If you haven’t and would like to, you can order the paperback using the link below. And I’m happy to join your book club for a Q&A, or consider visits with your school or library.<br><br>If you’re in NYC, we’ll be celebrating with a launch on Tuesday, 3/25/25 at P&T Knitwear, where I’ll be joined by Jennifer Baker, Temim Fruchter, Benedict Nguyễn, and Nina Sharma (ticket link below).<br><br>Tickets for 3/25 opening: <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/obsessions-a-memory-piece-paperback-launch-tickets-1206068957719" target="_blank">eventbrite.com</a><br><br>Purchase paperback: Link below...

Gregory Montreuil's work will be on exhibit at Rio Bravo Fine Art between March 8, and May 11, 2025, alongside works by Roy van der A. Bountiful Emptiness, a dual artists show will feature the artist's current works.

Last week I traveled across Washington State and finished recording guitar and percussion for a brand new record. This project is for flamenco guitar and brass ensemble that I’m working on with trumpeter Jay Roulston. It's a full-length, cinematic concept album and I'm thrilled with the progress we've made so far.<br><br>The project is a natural evolution of work I’ve done on my previous two albums, Punto Lejano and Espasón. The concept is based both in flamenco’s grassroots oral tradition and the Western notation system, borrows concepts from classical music and jazz, and blurs lines between composition and improvisation.<br><br>And what does all this sound like? I like to think of it as sounding something like this… Paco de Lucia meets Miles Davis meets Ennio Morricone meets Philip Glass.<br><br>I’m using Kickstarter to raise funds. The campaign is now LIVE and will end on March 31st at 11:59 PM, Pacific Standard Time. This is where you can pre-order your copy of the record.<br><br>Thank you again everyone for your continued support!<br><br><i>Photo by Visit Walla Walla</i>

Hi friends and writers! My flash essay "And what about the way hope..." has been published online at <i>In a Flash</i>. I'm excited for you and the world to read it. <br><br>Follow the link below to read "And what about the way hope...", with an introduction by Leanne Rose Sowul.

The Journal of the Print World (JPW) is devoted to antique and contemporary works of fine art on paper. After 46+ years of quarterly publication it has just published its 186th issue! This is a remarkable achievement. Included in their January 2025 issue is presented the image shown here; It is about my award-winning UNM Press book Art, Peace, and Transcendence https://www.paulre.org/art-peace-transcendence<br />
The work pictured in that file is: Paul Ré, Embrace in Hyperspace, 2004, Réogram (hybrid hand-digital print), edition of 4, 13” x 19”.<br />
This volume presents the vision for the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize https://www.paulre.org/peace which to date has recognized 43 diverse individuals and organizations for their peace-promoting efforts. On that webpage are links to view the 2020, 2022, and 2024 Peace Prize Receptions. Also, in the current issue of the Journal of the Print World in the New Works section is my recent artwork: <br />
Paul Ré, Let Us Dance in the Darkness, 2024, Réogram (hybrid hand-digital print), edition of 4, 13” x 19”. <br />
Thank you for your personal efforts to help heal our extremely challenged world.

Exciting news! I’m releasing my entire archive of films—free to watch on YouTube!<br />
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Every two weeks, I’ll share a new film, along with a personal essay on Patreon, Substack, and my newsletter. My archive includes 4 feature-length films and dozens of shorts—some of which have screened at Sundance, MoMA, and been distributed by Netflix & The New York Times.<br />
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From mushrooms to model railroads, these deeply personal and idiosyncratic films come from a mysterious place in me. I’m thrilled to finally make them all available to watch. Join me on this journey as I release my full archive!

Imogen Mason's solo debut album, <i>Pit of Mine</i>, released in November, has been met with widespread support and praise. A recent review by <i>The Quietus</i> beautifully captures her creative journey and highlights the influence that her time in Taos and the HWF residency had on the album's development.<br />
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Imogen is currently riding a wave of momentum, performing live shows, collaborating on remixes, and participating in live sessions. Amid her flourishing music career, she is also pursuing an MA in Fine Art at the University of the Arts, London, with a focus on sound and sound research—a path inspired by her transformative experience in Taos.<br />
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Read the full review on The Quietus: Pit of Mine Review

I was awarded the 2025 Willie Morris Award for Poetry. I will be presenting the winning poem at the Oxford Conference of Books April 2025

To celebrate the closing of the solo exhibition, Sky Into Stone, alumni and exhibiting artist Katrina "Kim" Bello and sound artist Jonathan Harris hosted an artist talk and listening session on January 3rd, 2025. Presented by Tusen Takk Foundation and The Dennos Museum in Traverse City, MI.

My new poetry from Dancing Girl Press—inspired by my activist brother’s life/death in New Mexico and a 19th c. statue that was created in Fukushima. <br />
In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a multi-vocal poem with parts spoken by Marie Curie, the Radium Girls, and a mysterious fisherman. A grieving sister’s encounters with a 19th century metal sculpture originally made in Fukushima and its associated legends of the sea prompt memories of her deceased brother’s activist years ensuring addition of LGBT to the state’s hate crimes law. He and his life partner converse about their lives in the high desert of the Southwest amid the nuclear industry's benchmarks of Los Alamos and Church Rock. The radiance of these voices has no half-life, no half-measures.

My tenth book of poems, <i>Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems</i>, 1982-2022 (TCU Press: Texas Poet Laureate Series) will be published on February 25:<br />
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Drawn from eight acclaimed books of poetry and spanning forty years, <i>Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems</i>, 1982-2022, is 2021 Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells’s long-awaited retrospective volume. Ellen Hinsey, in her compelling introduction, “A Lyric Poet in Dark Times,” heralds Cassells as “America’s foremost lyric poet, who, under the pressure of adverse circumstances, has turned from his home in music to unflinchingly face the blood and havoc of his era's civil sphere.” Hinsey makes revealing comparisons with Yeats’s trajectory from high lyricism to poems of lament and Irish Civil War witness: “when we read Cassells’s work over the last four decades, we are aware that the music he hears is intrinsically intertwined with the noise of the world’s destruction.” In addition, Hinsey lauds Cassells’s always riveting language “characterized throughout by a highly visual and expressive vocabulary, one touched by the grandeur of Shakespeare and the authority of the King James Bible. There is a love of verb and noun, a richness of consonance and assonance, and a voluptuousness that makes a feast of description.” Mark Doty has said: “The astonishing lyric fabric of Cassells’s work is weighted, as true lyrics of the earth must be, with the sorrow and cruelty of history. The sparkle of light on waves, the ‘foam and fish-scale blue’ of wild indigo can only be sung honestly beside the memory of the Middle Passage. One side of the song doesn’t cancel out the other; they are held, in Cassells’s sweeping oratorios, side by side.”

Solo exhibition by alumni Katrina "Kim" Bello, titled Sky Into Stone, presented by Tusen Takk Foundation and the Dennos Museum, in Traverse City, MI<br />
Sept 26, 2024 through January 5, 2025

This is the invitation to the 2024 Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize Reception/Symposium which was sent out by the UNM Foundation. It summarizes the vision and intent of the peace prize as well as the 53 year career of Paul Ré. At www.paulre.org you will find 8 pages including books, artworks, and the peace prize which presents bios and photos of our awardees and links to the 2020, 2022, and 2024 reception videos. Together they have received about 6000 views.

In 2023/24 I was invited to Graz, Austria, as the city's writer-in-residence for a year. The nice surprise came when I was offered a solo exhibition of the drawings from the Loopy Loonies series at the Kunsthaus Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum.

One of my plays, "Red Eye," will be in Program A of the Queens Short Play Festival.

Timothy Houghton reading "Ice Elf" in Florence, Italy, during the 90-minute presentation of his bilingual selected poems The Internal Distance. The reading took place at the Museo Casa di Dante on June 7, 2016.

"Poet David Groff on Creativity and Entrepreneurship"

Join Orchestra of St. Luke’s at a concert of new works under the baton of conductor Brad Lubman, a leading conductor of modern music known for his “strong, clear leadership” (The New York Times).

July 29th, 2025 | 7pm
The DiMenna Center
New York City

2025 DeGaetano Composers
Lukáš Janata
Paul Novak
Sofia Jen Ouyang
Zihan Wu

Seven Kitchens Press recently published its third title by John Repp, Star Shine in the Pines.

Wurlitzer Fellow David Cote wrote the libretto for this inspiring new 90-minute opera that follows the Ohio Innocence Project’s efforts to overturn the convictions of six men, women, and teens who were wrongly imprisoned for violent crimes they didn’t commit. Music by Scott Davenport Richards. Directed by Robin Guarino. MasterVoices 130-member choir and production conducted by Ted Sperling. NYC premiere at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater. Feb 3 & 4 at 7:30pm

"If / pleasure is an ending, then surely we are / joined," Jory Mickelson writes, in Picturing, where the viewer melds with the art, the gaze moves between and beyond, exposing a sorry inside desire’s hinge. From Marilyn Monroe to Icarus, Paul Cadmus to “the angel’s ruffling wings,” these poems shift the lines between longing and conquest, childhood and history, an open wound and a painter’s caress. Reveling in beauty and damage, this is a book that sings and singes.

Laura J. Bennett has won the 2024 Hariban Juror's Choice Award, selected by Tomoka Aya

Fiona Sze-Lorrain has been appointed as a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Prize. <br />
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Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a multifaceted writer, poet, translator, musician, and editor known for her distinctive voice across genres and cultures. She stands out as one of the few English-language women writers adept in multiple artistic expressions, crafting and translating works in English, French, and Chinese.<br />
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Her literary contributions include the novel-in-stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), five poetry collections—most recently Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016)—as well as fifteen books of translation and three coedited anthologies of international literature. Sze-Lorrain’s exceptional talent has garnered significant recognition; she was longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and has been a finalist for prestigious awards such as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.<br />
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A 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Sze-Lorrain also served as the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She currently resides in Paris, where she is an editor at Vif Éditions. In addition to her literary pursuits, Sze-Lorrain is an accomplished zheng harpist, performing widely across Europe, Asia, and the United States. Her expertise extends beyond the arts into negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution.

"The Silver Key" was written by JJ Slater at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM.<br />
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This is the story of a young man who keeps returning to a fever dream, and then slowly learns to create his own, at the motel (Silver Key).<br />
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Recorded at Sidetrack Studios in Northampton, MA.<br />
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Engineered by Anni Casella<br />
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Kevin Mason played all the drums, Dan Bisson played all the bass. We recorded as a trio live, pushing and pulling. Lexi Weege sang harmonies on a bunch of songs, and Anni and Tobey Sol La Roche joined in on "One More Ride" as well.<br />

On Sunday, December 16th, The Atlantic published my new poem "Fossil Record For My Grandmother".<br />
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Many, many thanks to Faith Hill & the poetry staff at @theatlantic for supporting my work and publishing my poem today. Link below...