INSTRUCTORS & AAC DIRECTOR

May 27th-June 6th 2020

 Kathryn “Kitsi” Watterson

Kathryn “Kitsi” Watterson, an award-winning journalist and writer, is the author of nine books, three of which are New York Times’ Notable Books. Her most recent, I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton, with a forward by Cornel West, presents stories “intrinsic to understanding the unwritten history of America.” Her books, Women in Prison, Not by the Sword, and You Must Be Dreaming, have generated documentaries, plays, songs, movies, and continuing scholarly research. Her creative writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania, as they were at Princeton University, are known for their close sense of community, laughter, personal empowerment, and engagement with the world. In addition, she sings, drums and plays percussion with an improvisational band, The Unity. She lives in the City of Philadelphia. She led Aegean Arts Circle's first workshop in 2003.

June 13th-June 23rd 2020  

Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-four books, including DIFFICULT:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry (Black Ocean, forthcoming); Look to Your Left:  A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle (Akron Poetry Series, forthcoming); Angel of the North (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming in 2023); Je Suis L’Autre:  Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; DARK HORSE:  Poems (C&R Press, 2018), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly; and two critical studies on contemporary poetry, which are forthcoming from Clemson University Press and Spuyten Duyvil Press, respectively. Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; five residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions, among many other awards and honors.  Her poems appear in Guernica, The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org.  She has published essays in Agni, Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly, a staff blogger at The Kenyon Review, and a freelance book critic at The New York Times Book Review. In 2019, she was named to the U.S. Fulbright Commission’s roster of Senior Specialists.  

Amalia Melis

Director
 Aegean Arts Circle

Amalia Melis is creator and organizer of Aegean Arts Circle Writing Workshops. Her essays, short stories and other creative writing have been published in Guernica, Glimmer Train, Michigan Quarterly Review (forthcoming), MacQueen's, KYSO Flash, DUCTS, Poet & Critic, Sojourner, among others. She is a freelance reporter/feature writer published in U.S. and Greek newspapers/magazines.She is an assemblage sculptor and her work has been part of group art exhibits in Vermont, U.S., Athens & Andros Greece, Berlin, Germany. She holds an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School of Social Research, New York.