
2023 KETTLE POND FACULTY

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. He has also authored four previous chapbooks, most recently GESUNDHEIT! (Glass Poetry Press, 2019), a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein. Chen’s work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.

Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015) and If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021). His awards include a 2019 fellowship from Ragdale Foundation, a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and first place in the 2015 Poetry Competition at Columbia Journal. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative, Blackbird, Pleiades, and in such anthologies as Best New Poets, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, and They Said: An Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Boulevard, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, Passages North, Colorado Review and elsewhere. He currently teaches private creative writing classes online and lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.

Brian Hall bicycled in western and eastern Europe for two years after attending Harvard University, and wrote his first book about those experiences: Stealing from a Deep Place (Hill and Wang, 1988). His most recently published novel, The Stone Loves the World (Viking, 2021), tells a story of two families – one made up largely of scientists and the other of artists – whose worlds collide in pursuit of a lost daughter. Other major works include Fall of Frost (Viking, 2008), I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (Viking, 2003), Madeleine’s World (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), The Saskiad (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), The Impossible Country (Godine, 1994), and The Dreamers (Harper and Row, 1989). Brian Hall has published in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. He occasionally teaches at Colgate University and currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
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Kem Joy Ukwu's fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Carve Magazine, PANK, Jabberwock Review and Auburn Avenue. Her short story collection, Locked Gray / Linked Blue, was selected as a finalist for the 2016 New American Fiction Prize and was published by the Kindred Books Imprint of Brain Mill Press. Locked Gray / Linked Blue was also selected as a 2018 Foreword INDIES Winner (Bronze Award in Literary). Kem led workshops as an Institute Scholar at the 2016 and 2018 Writing from the Margins Institute at Bloomfield College. Her screenplay, "Stats" (adapted from her published short story of the same title), was a Fall Selection for the 2022 Big Apple Film Festival's Agents and Managers Lab and a Quarterfinalist for the 2023 Creative Screenwriting Unique Voices Screenplay Competition. Born and raised in the Bronx, she lives in New Jersey with her husband.