Brian Blanchfield | Director, Creative Writing | Poetry
Brian Blanchfield is a poet and essayist; the author of a book of poems, Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004); and an editor of Fence Magazine, a national literary arts journal. He has taught creative writing and literature for eight years, primarily at the undergraduate and graduate levels, at Pratt Institute of Art, California Institute of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and the University of Montana, where, from 2008 to 2010, he was Richard Hugo Writer-in-Residence and visiting professor of poetry.
Before teaching, Brian worked for years on the editorial staffs of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Salon.com, and while earning an M.F.A. in creative writing at Warren Wilson College, he worked in the “small schools movement” in New York City public school reform advocacy.
To both his teaching and his creative work, collaboration with other artists has been increasingly central, and he has produced work with composers Homelite Gravely and Mark So, choreographers Anya Cloud and Jes Mullette, and video artist Jesse Aron Green, in whose Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, ICA) he was a performer.
About his first book Not Even Then, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Like the forbears he acknowledges (John Ashbery, Hart Crane), this clever, busy, anxious, flirtatious poet with his ‘predilections…for predicaments’ can connect anything to anything else.” Published and anthologized widely, and selected and translated into Italian for Nuova Poesia Americana, (Mondadori, 2009), Brian’s poems and interviews and essays appear in recent or upcoming issues of Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Bookforum, Poetry International, Chicago Review, Lana Turner, A Public Space, Harper’s Magazine, and The Paris Review.
Allan Reeder | Fiction
A fiction-writer since his uncle appeared at the front door with an IBM Selectric typewriter in 1978, Allan Reeder arrived at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in 2002, following a decade working as a professional literary editor.
In the mid-nineties, following work at The New England Review, Allan assisted novelist John Irving with three complete revisions of the 1,000-page manuscript for Irving’s eighth novel, A Son of the Circus, and with revisions to the original screenplays for A Son of the Circus and the Oscar-winning The Cider House Rules. He then moved to The Atlantic Monthly, where, in addition to contributing author interviews and nonfiction pieces to the magazine and its website, he edited the prose of a wide array of fiction writers, including John Updike, John Barth, Louise Erdrich, Francine Prose, Annie Proulx, and Edna O’Brien. Following his tenure at The Atlantic, Allan was the executive editor of fiction for DoubleTake magazine. In addition to revamping the magazine’s editorial systems and seeking new voices to publish, he ushered into print stories by William Maxwell, Stephen Dobyns, Julia Alvarez, and others.
Allan is a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy and holds a B.A. in English from Middlebury College and an M.A. from the renowned Bread Loaf School of English. At Bread Loaf, working with actors from the Trinity Repertory Theater, of Providence, Rhode Island, Allan expanded the scope of his literary endeavors to include playwriting and directing. He has published book reviews and travel essays—including a feature on his 4,000-mile bicycle trip across the United States—and for his fiction has been nominated as a Ploughshares “Emerging Writer”; has twice been awarded an Artist Grant in Fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2006, 2010); and has received a Full Fellowship in Fiction from the Vermont Studio Center. In 2007 he was awarded the E.E. Ford Prize for Exceptional Merit by his peers at Walnut Hill.
Read his short story “The Accident” here. Read his interview on the Massachusetts Cultural Council “Artsake” blog here.
Ronan Noone | Playwriting
Ronan Noone immigrated from Ireland in 1994. His first play, The Lepers of Baile Baiste (Samuel French, 2002), was workshopped at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre with Noble Laureate Derek Walcott and went on to win the National Playwriting Award at the American College Theatre Festival and to play at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, DC. In Boston, Lepers, together with The Blowin of Baile Gall, the second play in Ronan’s Irish trilogy, won the 2002 IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Best New Play.
The Blowin of Baile Gall (Dramatist Play Service, 2006), produced at BPT and at the Irish Arts Center in New York (Gabriel Byrne, Producer), was nominated for the American Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award and won the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script. As a playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theatre Company, Ronan wrote Brendan (Dramatists Play Service, 2009), which earned him another IRNE Best New Play Award and had its world premiere at the Huntington. His next work, The Atheist (Dramatists Play Service, 2009), premiered at Center Stage NY with Chris Pine, opened in London at Theatre 503 with Ben Porter, and played at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion with Campbell Scott and at the 2008 Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Ronan has attended and presented work at Sundance Theatre Lab, in Utah; Theatre Masters, in Aspen, Colorado; New York Stage and Film, at Vassar College; and The Lark in New York City and Vermont. He has written numerous one-act plays—Amereka, Sheeet, The Mutton Bandit Molloy, Enough, Headbanger, The Shit Stirring Machine, A Cup of Tea—and has adapted both Brendan and his latest work, Little Black Dress, which opened at BPT in the Fall of 2009, into screenplays. He has taught playwriting at Suffolk University, Emerson College, Worcester University, and Boston College, and is currently on the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at Boston University.
Read Amereka here.