Distinguished Fellows

John Briggs, best known as a science writer, is also a fiction writer and essayist. His latest book is Trickster Tales, a collection of stories. He is the author and co-author of several nonfiction books on aesthetics and physics, including Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos (Simon & Schuster); Fire in the Crucible (St. Martin's Press); Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (HarperCollins), Turbulent Mirror (HarperCollins), and Metaphor, the Logic of Poetry (Pace University Press). Senior editor of Connecticut Review, Briggs is Distinguished Professor of English and coordinator of the writing program at Western Connecticut State University.

 
Deborah W. Holton, associate professor at the School for New Learning, DePaul University, has been a member of that faculty since 1989. Holton has served as Writer-in-Residence for the District of Columbia, and as dramaturg for such distinguished companies as the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival and Pegasus Players. She has been involved in radio and recording projects through the years, and for over the past five her reading voice has been a mainstay on CRIS radio's, "Weekend Edition," a program featuring fiction by known and unknown authors. Holton's publications include essays regarding dramatic literature, and adult learning, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in publications including Essence. Currently, she is completing a novel set in ancient Egypt, a preoccupation of hers since childhood.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has published two volumes of poetry, Dog Road Woman, which won the American Book Award, and Off-Season City Pipe (both from Coffee House Press); and a memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (University of Nebraska Press). Her new volume, Blood Run (verse play regarding an indigenous mound site) was just published by Salt Publishing (UK). She has won both the Naropa Poetry Prize and the New Mexico Press Women's Creative Writing Award. Hedge Coke has served as National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hartwick College, New York; was an assistant professor of the English Department and MFA Program of Northern Michigan University; and is currently a professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In summer, 2005, she performed in the world's largest and most significant poetry festival in Medellin, Colombia, and in 2006 as the only woman poet invited from the United States to perform in the World Poetry Festival in Venezuela. She has been instrumental in organizing literature and writing projects for incarcerated youth and for Indigenous communities; she is dedicated to working for peace through poetry. She is Tsalagi, Huron, French Canadian and Portuguese.