Marjorie Welish [1944]
USA
Born on June 2, 1944, Marjorie Welish received her B.A. at Columbia University and attend Vermont College and Norwich University to receive an M.F.A. degree.
Living in New York, Welish teaches art, literary criticism, and art history at Pratt Institute, but she has also frequently taught poetry courses at Brown University. She was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University in 2005. Her first book of poetry, Handwritten, was published by Sun Press in 1979, and since that time she has published numerous other collections, including Two Windows Flew Open (1991), Casting Sequences (1993), The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems (2000, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets), Of the Diagram (2003), and Word Group (2004).
Welish has also published and book of essays, Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (published by Cambridge University Press in 1999) and is herself an artist, represented by Baumgartner Gallery in New York City and Aaron Galleries in Chicago.
In 2001 the University of Pennsylvania held a conference devoted to Welish’s work, showing several examples of her books and art along with the delivery of papers about her writing.
In 2009, Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists’ book by Welish and James Siena, which was the subject of a special exhibition at Denison Museum in Granville, Ohio; the book is in several permanent collections, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She has received grants and fellowships from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Fifth Floor Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the International Studio Program, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Handwritten (New York: Sun Press, 1979); Two Poems (Calais, Vermont: Z Press, 1981); The Windows Flew Open(Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck, 1991); Casting Sequences (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2000); Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Philadelphia: Slought Foundation, 2003); Word Group (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004)