Applications are still open for Arts Camp and Arts Academy. Programs fill quickly—submit your app today!

Holly Wren Spaulding

 Holly Wren Spaulding
Instructor of Creative Writing
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Creative Writing, Arts and Ideas in the Humanities
Oscar Wilde Center for Irish Writing at Trinity College, Ireland
Master of Philosophy, Creative Writing

About Holly

A teaching artist at Interlochen College of Creative Arts and Interlochen Online, Holly Wren Spaulding is the author of Familiars, If August, and Pilgrim, all published by Alice Greene & Company. Her chapbook, Fire, is forthcoming in 2021 from St. Brigid Press. The Grass Impossibly received the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Award for Poetry in 2008. Spaulding's other writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Poetry Northwest, The Ecologist and in Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction (Wayne State University Press, 2018), and elsewhere.

Spaulding has received awards for her poems, essays, teaching, and activism, including five Hopwood Awards, a Best of the Net award, Northern Ireland’s Cúchulainn to Kavanaugh Award for Poetry, and Pushcart Prize nominations. Residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Millay Colony for the Arts, Mesa Refuge, Arrowmont, and the Jean Noble Parsons Center for the Study of Art & Science have supported her projects. In 2018, the NEA backed her role in the conception of a pop-up artist residency, The Long Memory Project, based in northern Michigan. Spaulding's background in community organizing, documentary filmmaking, and writing on social justice and environmental issues, influences her teaching pedagogy and commitment to art as a means to reimagining a more just society. Spaulding is the founder of Poetry Forge where she teaches creative writing workshops and offers manuscript support to emerging poets. She also serves as guest faculty at arts institutions around the United States.

Spaulding was educated at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland where she earned a Master of Philosophy degree with a focus on Creative Writing, and at the University of Michigan, where she majored in Creative Writing and Arts and Ideas in the Humanities. She is an alumna of Interlochen Arts Academy and the National Music Camp.

My teaching philosophy is rooted in my background as a practicing poet, professional editor, and interdisciplinary artist. I urge my students to ground their process in a steady personal practice that gives them meaning, regardless of external affirmation. I believe we expand our humanity by creating art from our unique imaginations and experiences, which fulfills a profound need for meaning and purpose in the individual.

  • Author, Fire: Poetry (St. Brigid Press, Forthcoming 2021)
  • Author, Familiars: Poems (Alice Greene & Co., 2020)
  • Contributing author, Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction (Wayne State University Press, 2018)
  • Author, If August: Poetry (Alice Greene & Co., 2017)
  • Author, Pilgrim: Poems (Alice Greene & Co., 2014)
  • Founder, Poetry Forge
  • Faculty Excellence Award, Northwestern Michigan College
  • Author, The Grass Impossibly (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2008)
  • Nominated, Pushcart Prizes in Poetry
  • Nominated, Best of the Net Award
  • Avery Hopwood Awards in Poetry and Essay Writing
     

B.A., Creative Writing, Arts and Ideas in the Humanities-University of Michigan

M.Phil., Creative Writing-Trinity College, Ireland