Keith Abbott BA, San Francisco State
MA, Western Washington State
Keith Kumasen Abbott teaches fiction, non-fiction and screenplay writing along with poetry and art at Naropa University. He recently expanded his memoir of Richard Brautigan Downstream from Trout Fishing in America for the Astrophil Press 2009 edition. Abbott was filmed for a forthcoming Brautigan documentary produced by award winning Don Ranvaud (Farewell my Concubine, City of God, The Constant Gardener). He contributed to Richard Brautigan:Essays on the Writing and Life. (McFarland & Co). Publications include novels Gush, Rhino Ritz and Mordecai of Monterey, as well as the short story collections, Harum Scarum, The First Thing Coming and The French Girl. His story “Spanish Castle” was optioned by Ziji Productions, and he co-wrote the screenplay. His novel Racer was short-listed for the Berlinale Film Conference 2007. An essay “Raymond Carver The Gift of Anonymity: Social Class and Property in ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’” will appear in the International Raymond Carver Review. His pedagogical essay “The Things I Used To Do” appeared in the anthology, Does The Writing Workshop Still Work? (Multilingual Matters 2010). His essay “Rhythm-A-Ning: Philip Whalen’s Rhythmic Inventions” will reprinted in The Beats and Philosophy in the University of Kentucky Press Popular Culture series. His essay “Nothing Is Forever: Philip Zenshin Whalen’s Poem ‘Kozanji’ And The Kyoto Years” was accepted for the 2009 Northeast Modern Language Association panel "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form: Buddhism and American Poetry.” For the 2008 Western Literature Association conference he presented, "Twisting in the Wind: A Memoir of Ken Kesey" about Kesey's Naropa workshop and play Twister, staged in Boulder July 4, 1994. His latest poetry books are Next Door to Samsara (Fell Swoop, 2005) and Poetry For Sale (Mountains Rivers Forest Editions 2009). His poems are in the anthologies Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull 2007) and Rimbaud Après Rimbaud (Except Collection Textual 2004). His art/calligraphy appear in Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma magazines and in group and/or solo shows in San Francisco, Denver, Boulder, Shanghai, Seoul and San Antonio.
Junior Burke
BFA, University of Illinois
MFA, Naropa University
Junior Burke is a prose writer, dramatist and lyricist. His novel, Something Gorgeous, was published in 2005 by Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish. In fall 2004, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art presented Someone Else’s Dream, a cycle of his songs. In 1999, he won an Essay Award from New Millennium Writing, one of six writers cited nationally. He is also the director of Naropa’s low-residency MFA Creative Writing program. He received his MFA from the Kerouac School at Naropa University and teaches fiction and dramatic writing workshops and courses in literary studies.
Reed Bye, Acting Chair BA, University of Colorado
MA, University of Colorado
PhD, University of Colorado
Reed Bye is a poet and songwriter. His most recent book is Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems (United Artists Books, 2005). Other published works include Passing Freaks and Graces, Gaspar Still in His Cage and Some Magic at the Dump. A CD of original songs, Long Way Around, was released in 2005 by Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Angel Hair Anthology, Sleeping on the Wing and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Colorado and teaches poetry writing workshops and courses in classic and contemporary literary studies and contemplative poetics.
Indira Ganesan
BA, Vassar College
MFA, University of Iowa
Indira Ganesan is a novelist and fiction writer. She is the author of The Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) and Inheritance (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. A two-time Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the MacDowell Colony and the Paden Institute for Writers of Color. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and teaches fiction and essay writing workshops.
Anselm Hollo University of Helsinki
Institute of Tübingen
Anselm Hollo is a poet, translator and essayist. He is the author of more than thirty books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House, 2001). Other titles include Maya, Pick up the House, Corvus, Guests of Space. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into Finnish, French, German, Swedish and Hungarian. He is recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, grants from The Fund for Poetry, and the Government of Finland’s Distinguished Foreign Translator’s Award. Authors whose works he has translated include Paul Klee, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Paavo Haavikko and Mirkka Rekola. He teaches poetry and translation workshops and courses in literary studies.
Bhanu Kapil
MA, State University of New York, Brockport
Bhanu Kapil has written four full-length cross-genre works--The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books). Recent classes at Naropa have engaged architecture, somatics, biology and memory as ways to approach or navigate contemporary narrative and poetics. An on-going experimental pedagogy and reflection can be found at her blog: "Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor.]" Bhanu teaches across genres, with a particular focus on experimental prose writing.
Andrew Schelling
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz
Special Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Andrew Schelling has published seventeen books of poetry, essay, and translation, and has produced a large number of chapbooks, broadsides, journals & other publications—both in samizdat form and as book-art or fine letterpress printing. His writings are known for their attention to ecology, natural history, the oral literatures of “archaic internationalism,” and for their engagement with the literary traditions of South and East Asia. He has studied Sanskrit and related vernaculars for thirty years, and is currently learning Arapaho, an Algonkian language. Books of his own poetry include Old Tale Road (Empty Bowl Press, 2008) and Tea Shack Interior (Talisman House, 2002), and he recently edited an anthology of India’s bhakti poetry (vernacular languages, spiritual & political subversion) in English translation for Oxford University Press, Delhi. Eliot Weinberger writes that Schelling “is the latest incarnation in an American poetic lineage that began with the Transcendentalists and moved west with Rexroth and Snyder,” noting the “conjunction of wilderness expertise” with homegrown radical politics and an immersion in Asian literatures. Schelling has published six books of translation from India’s old languages, including Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India. On its release in 1991, that book received the Academy of American Poets prize in translation; White Pine Press issued an expanded second edition in 2008. He serves on the faculty at Deer Park Institute in the Kangra Valley, North India. At Naropa University, Schelling teaches poetry, translation, Pacific Rim literature, and Sanskrit. He oversees the Kavyayantra Press, the Kerouac School’s letterpress print shop. Currently he is editor-in-chief of Bombay Gin, the Jack Kerouac School’s literary journal.
Anne Waldman Co-founder, Distinguished Professor of Poetics
SWP Chair and Artistic Director
Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University and currently serves as Artistic Director of the Summer Writing program. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Manatee/Humanity, Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text Outrider. She is also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800-page epic Iovis Trilogy, forthcoming in 2011. She is editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa, with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She was an assistant director (1966–1968) and the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1968–1978) as well as the director of curriculum for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna in the fall of 1999. Her play RED NOIR played two and a half months on off off Broadway in New York City in 2009/10. Recent conferences and festivals include China, Berlin, Rome, Quebec, Luxembourg, Prague, Vienna, Britain, Spain, London, Italy, Prague, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. She was a fellow at The Bellagio Center and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria as well as a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and is a winner of The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. Anne Waldman’s considerable literary archives reside at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Beloved Integer (2007) and the collaborative text TRI/VIA (2003). Her work has been anthologized in For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. She has taught at Bard College, University of New Mexico, and Naropa University, where she is the director of Naropa Writing Center. Her teaching interests include writing pedagogy, avant-garde poetry, and gender/women's studies. Excerpts from her manuscript She, A Blueprint for InterSurface, with art by Sue Hammond West, have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Trickhouse, Mandorla, Upstairs at Duroc (France), and elsewhere. Michelle spent her sabbatical living in London and writing her new manuscript, tentatively titled Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, which explores Rothko’s floating borders in his Seagram Murals in relation to unstable cultural borders.
Bobbie Louise Hawkins is a fiction writer, monologist, performer and poet. Her most recent book is Bijou (Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish, 2005). She has published more than ten books of fiction, performance monologues and poetry, including My Own Alphabet and One Small Saga; and two CD’s, Live at the Great American Music Hall and Jaded Love. In 2001, Life As We Know It, a one-woman show, was performed in Boulder and New York City. She teaches fiction writing workshops and courses in literary studies.
Erik Anderson
BA, Creative Writing & Literature, University of Michigan
MFA, Writing & Poetics, Naropa University
PhD, English, University of Denver
Erik Anderson's book of lyric essays, The Poetics of Trespass, was published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions in 2010. He co-edits the magazine Thuggery & Grace and teaches in the low-residency MFA program. His critical and creative work has appeared widely.
Lisa Birman
SWP Director
Lisa Birman, MFA Naropa University, is a poet and writer from Melbourne, Australia. She is Director and BA Coordinator of The Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program, and adjunct faculty for Naropa’s MFA in Creative Writing. She is the author of for that return passage– A Valentine for the United States of America (Hollowdeck Press), and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House Press). Recent work has appeared in Trickhouse, Tarpaulin Sky, Bombay Gin, not enough night, Square One and thuggery & grace. Lisa is a freelance proofreader and copyeditor, and co-founder of Movie Star Press
Amy Catanzano BA, Colorado State University
MFA, University of Iowa
Amy Catanzano is a lecturer, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing and literature, and the administrative director of the Department of Writing and Poetics. She is also managing editor of Naropa's literary journal, Bombay Gin. She is the author of Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009), selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize and winner of the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry; iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs, 2008); and an electronic chapbook, the heartbeat is a fractal (Ahadada Books, 2009). Her poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction appear in literary journals such as New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky, La Petite Zine,Conjunctions, Volt, and Colorado Review and in the anthologies, A Best of Fence (Fence Books, 2009) and Disco Prairie Social Aid and Pleasure Club (Factory Hollow Press, 2010). An essay, "Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light," in which she investigates poetry and prose in relation to theoretical physics such as string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity, appears on Jerome Rothenberg's website, Poems and Poetics. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
J’Lyn Chapman MA, English, University of Central Florida
PhD, English, University of Denver
J'Lyn Chapman holds a PhD from the University of Denver, where she studied text and image in the work of W.G. Sebald. She is the Graduate Academic Advisor and a lecturer in the Department of Writing and Poetics. As a writer, J'Lyn is working on a series of lyrical essays about sorrow and memory as well as a critical essay on images and text. Her work can be found in Sleepingfish, Fence, Thuggery & Grace and Conjunctions. Her chapbook, Bear Stories, was published by Calamari Press.
Jack Collom MA, English, University of Colorado
Jack is a poet, essayist and creative writing pedagogue. His most recent collection of poems is Cold Instant (Monkey Puzzle, 2010). His major collection, Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000, was published by Tuumba Press in 2001. Other volumes include Little Grand Island, Arguing with Something Plato Said, 8-Ball and Entering the City. His work has been published in countless magazines and anthologies in the United States and abroad. His essays on teaching and anthologies of children’s poetry appear in Moving Windows and Poetry Everywhere. He has produced two CD’s of original work performed in collaboration with musician/composer Ken Bernstein and been awarded two NEA fellowships. He received his MA in English from the University of Colorado, and teaches courses in eco-literature and outreach teacher-training.
Kika Dorsey PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle
Kika Dorsey has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she also published and performed her poetry extensively. She is published in numerous journals, including The Denver Quarterly, The California Quarterly, The Comstock Review and Anyone is Possible. She has taught literature, film and writing at the University of Washington, The University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College and Front Range Community College. She has also worked freelance as a proofreader, editor and translator of German. She lives in Boulder with her husband, two children, old dog and three birds.
Danielle Dutton BA, History, University of California at Santa Cruz (1997)
MFA, Creative Writing, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002)
PhD, English/Creative Writing, University of Denver (2007)
Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) and S P R A W L (Siglio Press, 2010). Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, Where We Live Now: An Annotated Reader, and other magazines and anthologies. She designs books at Dalkey Archive Press; teaches fiction and literature courses in Naropa’s low-res MFA; and edits Dorothy, a publishing project.
Barbara Henning
Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry, and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her most recent books are a collection of poetry and prose, Cities & Memory (Chax Press, 2010); a novel, Thirty Miles from Rosebud (BlazeVox, 2009); and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists, 2007). Poems and stories have been published in many magazines, including Poetry International, Jacket Magazine, the Paris Review, Fiction International, Journal 1913, The Brooklyn Rail, The World, Talisman, Lingo, Shiny, Not Enough Night and Hanging Loose. In the 1990s Barbara was the editor of Long News in the Short Century. Born in Detroit, she moved to New York City in the early 1980s. Professor Emerita at Long Island University Brooklyn Campus, she is presently teaching courses for Naropa University, as well as LIU.
Stephani Nola
BA, University of Maine
MFA Candidate, Naropa University
Poet and artist Stephani Nola Walton grew up on a potato farm in Maine, equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and Appalachian Trail. Her first chapbook, Of Certain Rivers, is hand-stitched and illustrated with linoleum cuts. As an undergraduate she interned in New York City for Avalon Publishing Group and Scholastic. Her passion for “poetry therapy” is inspired by volunteering at an after-school program for refugees from Sudan in Burlington, Vermont. Stephani is the Graduate Assistant for administrative support for the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University.
Brad O’Sullivan MFA, Naropa University
Brad is a poet, letterpress printer, and tinkerer. He has published a book of poetry, Pointing at the Direction of Sound (Rodent Press, 1996), and has been teaching the craft of letterpress printing since 1996. Since then, Brad has collaborated with dozens of artists and writers in the production of over fifty books, chapbooks and ephemera. His letterpress work was included in a national books arts exhibit in the late 1990s, and he is proprietor of Smokeproof Press, a custom letterpress workshop in Boulder,Colorado. He teaches letterpress printing.
Maureen Owen
Maureen Owen is a poet, editor and publisher. She is the author of ten poetry titles, most recently Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE(Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has had work most recently published in YAWP magazine, Columbia Review, and Talisman #28-29. Other books include Imaginary Income, Zombie Notes, a brass choir approaches the burial ground, The No-Travels Journal and Untapped Maps. A special selection of poems from her title Erosion’s Pull, in collaboration with the stunning art of New York artist Yvonne Jacquette, is available from Granary Books. Her work has been included in several anthologies including Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing By Women. She has taught numerous workshops and classes in poetry and book production and her awards include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry and a Poetry Fellowship from the NEA. She has received grants, awards and fellowships for her writing from, among others, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Inc., the Fund for Poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served as program coordinator at The St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. She attended Seattle University and San Francisco State University and teaches Creative Writing and courses in literary studies both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program. Maureen is editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night.
Ariella Ruth BA, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts MFA Candidate, Naropa University
Ariella Ruth is a poet and performer from Boston, Massachusetts. She has worked for Small Press Traffic, a literary arts center in San Francisco, Epiphany, a New York-based literary journal, and was an assistant editor for Letters to Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, and Community, released Winter 2008 from Saturnalia Books. She is Associate Editor and the Graduate Assistant for Publications for Bombay Gin in the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University.
Julia Seko
Julia Seko is a letterpress printer, book artist and proprietor of P.S. Press. Trained in letterpress printing at the Women's Graphic Center in Los Angeles, she is adjunct faculty in the Writing & Poetics Department at Naropa University and is active in the Book Arts League, a nonprofit community book arts organization. She has taught book arts and letterpress printing in the Boulder/Denver area through various institutions and organizations including the Book Arts League, University of Colorado extension and Naropa University, where she helped set up the letterpress studio. Her letterpress work is in university and private collections and has been exhibited in the United States and Ireland.
Steven Taylor
BA, Glassboro State College
PhD, Brown University
Steven Taylor is a poet, musician, song writer and ethnomusicologist. He has published two books of poems and a musical ethnography, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He has composed music for the theater, film, radio drama, and installations and made more than a dozen records with various artists. He has toured and recorded with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, the Fugs and the New York hardcore band False Prophets. He teaches poetry workshops and literary theory classes in the MFA and BA programs and the history of the avant-garde in the lower division.
Sara Veglahn
PhD, University of Denver
MFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
BA, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
Sara Veglahn is the author of Another Random Heart (Letter Machine Editions, 2009), Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008), and Falling Forward (Braincase, 2003). Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including: Conjunctions, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Trickhouse, and Bombay Gin. She served as the associate editor for the Denver Quarterly (2007-2009), and has taught writing and literature at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and in the Music Department and the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University.
Indira Ganesan
Bhanu Kapil 
Andrew Schelling
Anne Waldman
Erik Anderson
Lisa Birman 
Amy Catanzano
J’Lyn Chapman
Jack Collom
Kika Dorsey
Danielle Dutton
Barbara Henning
Stephani Nola
Maureen Owen
Ariella Ruth
Julia Seko 
Steven Taylor 
Sara Veglahn