North Country Institute for Writers of Color - 2007 Faculty

Chris Abani

Chris Abani's prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007) GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005), Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985) and the novellas, Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006) and Song For Night (Akashic, 2007). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award & the PEN Hemingway Book Prize. Source: www.chrisabani.com

Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York, the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawaii and a German American father from Wisconsin. She received an undergraduate degree in English and east Asian studies from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 1984. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006); The Artist's Daughter (2002); Mosquito and Ant (1999); Volatile (1998); and The Unbearable Heart (1995), which received an American Book Award.

Hahn is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. She is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY and lives in New York. Source: Poets & Writers.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, and raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, Baca learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry while serving a five year sentence in a maximum security prison at the age of twenty-one. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the National Poetry Award, and, for his memoir A Place To Stand, the prestigious International Award. His other books include The Importance of a Piece of Paper; Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande; Healing Earthquakes; C-Train & Thirteen Mexicans; Black Mesa Poems; Martin & Meditations on the South Valley, and Immigrants in Our Own Land. Sources: www.blueflowerarts.com and Wikipedia