CHASE TWICHELL
Poet & Teacher
About
Photo by Margaret Miller Reuther
Recognition:
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Chase Twichell’s work has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her work received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Snow Watcher won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. She was awarded a Smart Family Foundation Award in 2004 for poems published in The Yale Review. In 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. Her most recent book, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, won both the Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, was published by Copper Canyon in the fall of 2018.
Chase Twichell was born in 1950, and grew up in Connecticut and the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018).
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After teaching for many years (Hampshire College, the University of Alabama, Princeton University), she left academia to found Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of contemporary poetry, which was acquired by Copper Canyon in 2009.
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From 2013 to 2016 she served as Chair of the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Awards Jury.
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She's recently taught in the Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
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A longtime student in the Mountains and Rivers Order at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, she and her husband, the novelist Russell Banks, split the year between the Adirondacks and Saratoga Springs, NY.
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She's available for readings, workshops, conferences, and residencies.
Education:
BA, Trinity College, 1973
MFA, University of Iowa, 1976
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Teaching:
Princeton University (Lecturer in Poetry, adjunct), 1990—2000
University of Alabama (Tenured Associate Professor), 1985—1989
Hampshire College (Visiting Assistant Professor), 1983—1984
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Low Residency, short-residency, conferences, part time, adjunct, & visiting/resident poet jobs:
Smith College, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New York University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Hampshire College, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, New York State Writers’ Institute at Skidmore College, University of Arizona Writers' Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Bucknell Poet-in-residence, Hamilton College, and many others.
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Editorial:
Chair & Jury Member, Kate and Kingsley Tufts Awards (Claremont Graduate University), 2013—2016
Judge, Griffin Poetry Awards (with Colm Toíbin and Tim Lilburn), 2011
Founder/Editor, Ausable Press, 1999—2009
Poetry Judge (with Thomas Rabbitt), University of Alabama Press Poetry Series, 1985—1988
Poetry Judge (with Pamela Alexander and William Matthews), Wesleyan University Press, 1982—1984
Poetry Juror, University of Massachusetts Press, 1981—1984
Assistant to Barry Moser, Pennyroyal Press, 1976—1985