Reading and Conversation with Ellen Bryant Voigt, part of the Lane Lecture Series

The Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the next event in the Lane Lecture Series: Reading with Ellen Bryant Voigt, in Conversation with Jennifer Grotz.

This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Registration is encouraged but not required. Register here

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Ellen Bryant Voigt was born and raised on a farm in Virginia and moved to Vermont in 1969. She is the author of nine collections of poetry: The Collected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2023); Headwaters (W.W. Norton, 2013); Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton, 2007); Shadow of Heaven (W.W. Norton, 2002), a finalist for the National Book Award; Kyrie (W.W. Norton,1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Two Trees (W.W. Norton, 1992); The Lotus Flowers (W.W. Norton,1987); The Forces of Plenty (W.W. Norton, 1983); and Claiming Kin (Wesleyan University press, 1976). Her collections of essays about poetry are The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009). Voigt’s honors include Pushcart Prizes, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poets’ Prize, the 2002 Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library; grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, as well as the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.

In 1976, at Goddard College, Voigt developed and directed the nation’s first low-residency writing program—a design for graduate MFA study that has been widely emulated—and later helped guide its reincarnation as the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has also taught at Iowa Wesleyan College, MIT, and as a visiting writer at many colleges and universities.

Voigt has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as the Vermont State Poet. She now lives in Cabot, Vermont and St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling (Graywolf Press, 2023). Also a translator from the French and Polish, her newest translation is Everything I Don't Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer (World Poetry, 2021). Her poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in five volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology. The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, Grotz has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences, she teaches at the University of Rochester.