North Country Institute for Writers of Color - 2009 Faculty

Donna Hemans

Donna Hemans is the author of River Woman (Washington Square Press, Pocket Books), which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2003 and co-winner of the 2003-2004 Towson University Prize for Literature. Her short fiction has appeared in Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, MaComere: The Journal of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, THEMA, Witness, and the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad.

Hemans was the 2007-2008 Black Mountain Institute (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) International Women's Forum Fellow. She has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Prince George's County Arts Council, as well as residential fellowships from Millay Colony for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Hemans twice served as the Lannan Visiting Creative Writer in Residence at Georgetown University and has taught fiction writing at the University of the West Indies campus in Kingston, Jamaica. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an M.F.A. from American University.

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. His third volume of poetry Holding Company is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Jackson is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

• Website: www.majorjackson.com