| The POETIC DIALOGUE PROJECT an exhibition of collaborative works by artists and poets Poets' Biographies |
Maurya Simon has taught creative writing at UCR for 23 years. She is the author of eight volumes of poetry,
including Ghost Orchid, which was nominated in 2004 for a National Book Award in Poetry. Her new volume,
Cartographies, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in the Winter of 2008. Maurya has been the recipient of a
Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a University Award from the Academy of
American Poets, the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America,
and a Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship in Bangalore, South India. Maurya has held writer residencies at the
MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators in Visby, Sweden, at
Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as at the American Academy in Rome. In addition, she served
as a U.C. faculty lecturer at Lund University in southern Sweden. Maurya’s poems have appeared in The New
Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg
Review, Grand Street, Agni, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New England
Review, and in more than fifty anthologies. In addition, Maurya’s poetry has been translated into French,
Rumanian, Bengali, Swedish, Spanish, and Farsi. An opera entitled “Tamar,” based on Maurya’s eponymous verse
libretto, premiered at the University of Rhode Island in March of 2007.
Nance Van Winckel's fifth collection of poems, No Starling, is recently out from U. of Washington Press. She is the
recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie
Schooner. New poems appear in The Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry
Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction.
She teaches in the MFA Programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College.
Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven
children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky,
earning degrees in English and Theater Arts before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. A celebrated teacher of
creative writing, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people
throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators,
participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison for the criminally insane, and residents
of a shelter for homeless women. She has served on the creative writing faculties at the University of Redlands,
California State University at Northridge, The New England College MFA Program in Poetry and Emory University,
and is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California, as well as a
writer-in-residence with the Western Connecticut State University MFA Program in Creative Writing. . She is the
founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop. Her books of poems are
Sacrifice (Cahuenga Press, 1997), a BookSense 76 Selection; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (Cahuenga Press 2002); and
Late (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003), for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004. She's
received fellowships from the California Arts Council, CEC/ArtsLink International, Hawthornden Castle
International Writers Retreat, the Isaac Bernheim Foundation and the Chateau de la Napoule Foundation. She
spends part of each year on the road in the U.S. and Europe, and feels most at home in Paris and in the Carpathian
mountains of southeastern Poland.
