Columbia County, and the nearby Berkshire Mountains, are popular destinations because of their historical, natural and cultural riches. From bird sanctuaries to modern dance, presidential mansions to farmer’s markets, the environs offer a singular blend of rural quiet and cultural stimulation. Staff and friends in the neighborhood are often available for excursions of interest to residents. The local library has a modest collection, but is a member of the Mid-Hudson group, calling on the resources of libraries within much of eastern New York. 

Links to useful websites in the area:

Columbia County Tourism
Discover the Berkshires
Greene County Tourism
Dutchess County Tourism
Rural Intelligence

Peter Orner (US, Fiction)
March 22 - April 11
Peter's work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. He is the author of two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (forthcoming, 2013) and two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love. Orner is also the editor of two books of non-fiction, Underground America, Hope Deferred; Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Orner lives and works in San Francisco.


Marjorie Celona (US, Fiction)
March 22 - April 18
Marjorie is the author of the novel Y.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she was recently named the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow at Colgate University and writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, she now lives in Cincinnati.


Lisa Ko  (US, Fiction)
March 22-April 18
Lisa was born and lives in New York City. A former New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and the recipient of writing grants from the Van Lier Foundation and the Jerome Foundation, her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Narrative and Brooklyn Review. She has worked as a university creative writing and literature teacher, a media archivist, a magazine editor, and a journalist, and is finishing her novel, Jackpot.


Kiran Desai (India/US, Fiction)
March 22-April 25
Kiran is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently working on a novel.


Donal McLaughlin (Scotland, Translation/Fiction)
March 23-May 1
Donal is both a writer and a translator. His short story collection - an allergic reaction to national anthems & other stories - was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. A second collection is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive (Spring 2014). His work has appeared in Best European Fiction 2012. As a translator, Donal specializes in Swiss-German fiction. He has also edited selections of contemporary writing from Slovenia, Latvia and Scotland.
www.donalmclaughlin.wordpress.com


Colie Hoffman (US, Poetry)
March 25 - April 11
Colie is an American poet and editor living in New York's Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared most recently in Sixth Finch, TYPO, and TheThePoetry. She was the recipient of the M Literary Residency at Sangam House in South India (2010) and earned her MFA at Hunter College-CUNY. Her current projects include a collaborative poem/collage chapbook and a full-length book of poems about the history of medicine.


Els Beerten (Belgium, Fiction)
March 29 – April 25
Els is the author of YA novels about the search for security and confidence, and the importance of being honest with yourself and to others. Lopen voor je leven (Run for your life, 2003) won her a Gouden Zoen (Golden Kiss) Award, the Little Cervantes Prize and the first prize of the Flemish Children's and Youth Jury. Allemaal willen we de hemel (We all want heaven, 2008) received several prizes in Flanders and the Netherlands, and was nominated twice for the German Jugendliteraturpreis. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, Norwegian, Macedonian and Hungarian. Els has taught and lived in South Africa and Suriname.
www.elsbeerten.com


V. Ramaswamy (India, Translation/Non-Fiction)
April 5-May 2
Rama is a Calcutta-based business executive, grassroots organizer, social planner, teacher, non-fiction writer and translator. He is translating the short fiction of the Bengal anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra. The first volume, The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories was published in 2010. Ramaswamy is a recipient of the 2013 Sarai fellowship, under which he is currently translating two urban non-fiction texts about the city of Calcutta.


Mathilde Walter Clark (Denmark, Nonfiction/Fiction)         
April 11-May 9
Mathilde grew up spending winters with her mother in Denmark and summers with her father in the US. She has a Master's in Philosophy from Roskilde University and New York University. She has published five works of fiction, her most recent being the novel Cast (2012). She was awarded the Carlsberg Foundation "Discovery of the Year" and the Three Year Scholarship from the Danish Art Foundation. She writes critical essays, discusses current cultural matters in a weekly talk show, and has written and hosted a philosophical TV series for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. In 2013 she published a genre-bending work Patron Wanted, which is part literature, art book, handbook, documentary, film and performance, documenting a year she spent looking for a patron.  
www.mathildewalterclark.com


Anna Moschovakis (US, Translation/Poetry)                          
April 18-May 2
Anna most recent books are You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (poems) and The Jokers, a translation of Albert Cossery's novel La violence et la dérision. She teaches at Pratt Institute and is on faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is also an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.


Robert Karjel  (Sweden, Fiction/Film) 
April 19–May 16
Robert's first novel was published in 1997; to date, he has published four novels. Just recently the movie rights for his latest book, The Swede, were sold. Robert is an active helicopter pilot in the Swedish Air Force. As a pilot-writer he works in the tradition of James Salter and Antoine de Saint-Expéry, each of whom explored solitude and the human condition as experienced from the air.


Wolf Haas (Austria, Fiction)                                                
May 15-June 7
Wolf studied linguistics and worked for a few years as a copywriter for an advertising company. He is most widely known for his crime fiction novels featuring detective Brenner. Seven Brenner books have been published since 1996, three of which were made into movies. In recent years he published two non-crime-novels. In 2012 the American publisher Melville House started publishing the Brenner-series in the US ("Brenner and God" (2012), "The Bone Man" (2013)). Wolf Haas lives in Vienna.


Scott Carney (US, Nonfiction)
April 20 - May 1
Scott is an investigative journalist and anthropologist whose stories blend narrative non-fiction with ethnography. His work appears in Wired, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Details and other magazines. His first book "The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers" was completed during a short residency at Ledig House in 2010. He has spent six years living in India but currently resides in Long Beach, CA.
www.scottcarney.com

Christopher Kloeble (Germany, Fiction/Theater/Film)       
April 26-May 9
Christopher grew up in Bavaria and studied at the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. His plays have been staged at theatres in Vienna, Munich, Heidelberg and Nuremberg. In 2011, his first screenplay Inclusion was produced and won the ABU-prize for "Best TV Drama." For his first novel, Amongst Loners, Kloeble won the Juergen Ponto-Stiftung prize for "Best Debut 2008"; his second book, A Knock at the Door, followed in 2009. The third, More Often Than Not All Very Fast, appeared in 2012 and is being translated into several languages. Kloeble is currently adapting it as a feature film.


Mayela Gerhardt (Germany, Translation)                                
April 26-May 23
Mayela was born in Mexico, spent her early childhood in Costa Rica and moved to Germany at the age of five. She holds a Diploma in Literary Translation from the University of Düsseldorf and has translated several books from English and French into German. At Writers Omi, she will be working on the German translation of Australian writer Margo Lanagan's award-winning novel Tender Morsels. Mayela loves vegetarian food, salsa dancing, singing, doing public readings with her authors, and traveling all over the world.



Robert Haasnoot (Netherlands, Fiction/Theater)                              
May 3-30
Robert was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and moved to The Netherlands at an early age. He grew up in a fishing-village on the North Sea. Robert did not leave the town until the age of 17 when he returned to the US for four years to work and study. He published his first novel in 1997, and has published six more since then, several have been translated into Spanish and German. He has also written a play that was staged in Holland and Germany. He has a daughter and a son.


Katja Kullmann (Germany, Fiction/Nonfiction)
May 3 – June 7
Katja was born near Frankfurt and now lives in Hamburg. She received a Master's degree in Political Sciences and Sociology in 1996. Katja considers herself a "creative non-fiction"- and "fiction"-writer and has published four books: three essays and a novel. Her first book, which dealt with gender topics, was awarded the German Buchpreis and translated into four other languages (not into English yet). Her latest book sketches a portrait of the city of Detroit.


Josh Mak (US, Fiction)
May 3 – June 7
Josh is at work on a collection of linked stories set in the San Gabriel Valley, California. He was a 2012 artist resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and is currently a contributing writer at Flavorwire. He lives in Los Angeles.


Amir Hassan Cheheltan (Iran, Fiction/Nonfiction)
May 3-June 7
Amir was born in Tehran and studied Electrical Engineering at the local university. He published his first collection of short stories in 1976. He has published eight novels, five story collections and more than 50 Essays in German papers among them Suddeutsch Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine. He has received several fellowships in US and Europe and has lived in England, Italy, Germany and the US. He runs two creative writing workshops in Tehran and has been a member of Iran Writers Union and a member of the jury of different Persian literary awards.


Ottessa Moshfegh  (US, Fiction)
May 10-June 7
Otessa is a fiction writer living in Los Angeles. She was born in Boston and received her MFA in creative writing from Brown University. Her short stories have appeared in Fence, Noon, Unsaid, Guernica, Vice, and The Paris Review. She was recently awarded a Stegner Fellowship in fiction.


Bianca Bagatourian (US/UK, Theater)
May 10-June 7
Bianca is an experimental playwright and graduate of the MFA playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Themes in her work often centers around those of identity, disillusionment and alienation, these being intimately woven into the fabric of her life. Her plays have been performed throughout the US and Europe. Bianca is also the founder and president of the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance, a non-profit organization with two $10,000 bi-annual writing contests – The William Saroyan Playwriting Award and the Paul Screenwriting Award. She is currently producing several film projects, as well as a documentary, which illustrates how many of the genocides of the past century shared warning signs.

LuLing Osofsky (US, Nonfiction)
May 10-June 7
A former reporter for the Ulan Bataar Post, LuLing's writing about Asia has been supported by the Freeman Foundation for East Asian Studies and the Indonesian Ministry of Culture. She's currently at work on a book about Jewish boxers imprisoned at Auschwitz who fought for the entertainment of Nazi officers. She received her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has recent and forthcoming publications in Orion Magazine.


Janet Ha (South Korea/US, Fiction)
May 17-June 7
Born in Chicago and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Janet Ha graduated from Amherst in 2007, double majoring in English and classical studies. She went on to work at Google's headquarters in the Silicon Valley for a year, after which she moved to the corporation's Boston office to be with her husband Matthew Mascioli. She is now in her third and final year at Indiana University Bloomington's Master of Fine Arts program in fiction writing. She plans to write full time upon graduation in May.