Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence Program
The Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Fund was established by Bill and Karin Stahl in memory of their daughter, Kristina Stahl ’99, who died tragically in 2002. More information about Kristina.
The Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Fund supports the Creative Writing Program at Colby through three initiatives, the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence, the Kristina Stahl Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and the Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Internships.
Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence
Each year the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence brings a nationally recognized poet or prose writer to Colby to visit classes, lecture on craft, give a reading, and meet with creative writing students. Past writers-in-residence include Tony Hoagland, Margot Livesey, Maurice Manning, Steve Orlen, Bill Roorbach, Dani Shapiro, Jo Ann Beard, Edward Hirsch, Diane Suess, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Joan Wickersham, and Marilyn Chin.
In 2023, the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence was Mary Ruefle, who gave a reading and a talk titled “A Poet’s Thoughts and Remarks on the Imagination, Which Might Not Be What You Thought It Was.”
Mary Ruefle has published over a dozen books of poetry, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, My Private Property (2016), Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007), and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and the work of fiction The Most of It (2008). A Little White Shadow (2006) is her book of wildly celebrated erasures. Ruefle has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the Poet Laureate of Vermont.