Founded in 1993 by Thomas Lux and Jane Cooper, the Summer Seminar is a chance for writers to experience the Sarah Lawrence pedagogy, to work with a faculty of acclaimed writers and passionate teachers, and to spend a week in a stimulating atmosphere, where writing—and thinking about writing—is at the core.
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received many honors and awards, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, three Best American Poetry selections, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014, he was named a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He is professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and lives in Pittsburgh with his family.
Tiphanie Yanique (born September 20, 1978) is a Caribbean fiction writer, poet, and essayist, born in the United States Virgin Islands, who lives in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010, the National Book Foundation named her a 5 Under 35 honoree. Yanique’s debut collection, How to Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories, was published by Graywolf Press in 2010. Her novel, Land of Love and Drowning, was published by Riverhead Books in 2014, and was described by Publishers Weekly as “an affecting narrative of the Virgin Islands that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place.”