Ellen Bryant Voigt developed and directed the country’s first low-residency writing program in the mid-seventies, at Goddard College, and helped move it to Warren Wilson in 1981. A Guggenheim, Lila-Wallace and NEA Fellow, she
was Professor of Poetry at MIT for three years and has taught at the Bread Loaf, Aspen, Indiana, Napa, Catskills, Sarah Lawrence, Sewanee and RopeWalk Writers’ Conferences. Voigt has published six books of poetry: Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, Kyrie (a National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist and Teasdale Prize winner), and most recently, Shadow of Heaven, a National Book Award Finalist. She co-edited with Gregory Orr, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, a selection of craft essays by Warren Wilson MFA faculty, and has also collected her own essays in The Flexible Lyric. In 2002 she was awarded the Merrill Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets and the O.B.Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has just completed a 4-year term as Vermont State Poet, was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.