Dear Governor Scott, Lt. Gov. Zuckerman, Members of the Vermont House and Senate, Chancellor Mauck, President Bergh, and Members of the Board of Trustees of Vermont State University:

Hello. It is with regret that we write this letter. Over the past several weeks we have reached out to you to express our concern for the decisions that you, along with most of the legislature, have made that diminish the quality and diversity of Vermont’s educational offerings at our State colleges. Given our collective experience, scholarship, and considerable record of achievement and engagement in the arts in Vermont, as well as throughout the country, we had hoped that our concerns would have influenced your decision-making in restoring and even enhancing the arts curriculum within the VTSU system.

Neither Chancellor Mauck, President Bergh, the Board of Trustees of the VTSU, nor you and most of the legislature have, as yet, responded to our concerns about the elimination of liberal arts and arts curricula in our public colleges. Your lack of response sends a discouraging message to aspiring artists, creative writers, arts faculty, and finally, but not least, the large population of art and book lovers throughout Vermont. Such disrespect for the arts is not Vermont.       

Research shows that arts and cultural production strengthens economic resiliency. Vermont’s nonprofit arts and culture organization generated $158.6 million in economic activity in 2022 — supporting 2,712 jobs and generating $34.8 million in tax revenue for local, state and federal governments.” (VTDigger | Jan. 2024). While we applaud the support that the State does provide to some arts organizations, we are deeply concerned about the draconian cuts that have eliminated the once revered MFA program at Johnson State, along with its nationally renowned literary journal, Green Mountains Review.

We acknowledge the unfortunate shortfalls in the State’s budget for education which has led to the elimination of faculty and courses throughout the VTSU system, but we are also aware that some departments, particularly those that focus on technical professional programs, receive funding disproportionate to others, reflecting, in turn, an unwarranted and unresearched bias toward some programs over others. We lament this inequity, viewing it as both an academic and administrative failing that skews the curricular execution and vision of VTSU’s mission with myopic favoritism.

We write in the hope that you can and will correct this bias with a more equitable approach to all the academic disciplines offered in the VTSU curriculum, particularly its arts programs that have all but disappeared from VTSU’s offerings. As someone who earned an MFA degree before becoming a published poet and author of several books of poetry, I can attest to the pedagogical value of studying under established poets and writers. Yes, Creative Writing can be taught. The list of contemporary American poets and writers who have attended MFA programs is much longer than that of those who haven’t. Given Vermont’s august reputation as a state with a legendary history of great poets and writers, including Robert Frost, Louise Gluck (Nobel Prize), Ellen Bryant Voigt (MacArthur Fellow), Hayden Carruth (National Book Award), Ruth Stone (National Book Award), it is only right that the State Legislature acknowledge and support at least one state-funded MFA program.

We welcome a reply and appreciate your consideration.

Sincerely, Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont, 2015-2019

Chard de Niord, Vermont Poet Laureate 2015 – 2019. Co-founder of the New England College Master of Fine Arts program in poetry. Fellow of Vermont’s Academy of Arts and Sciences. Pushcart Prize recipient. Author of seven books of poetry.

Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate 2011 – 2015. Author of numerous books of poetry, a novel, and several nonfiction collections. His poetry collection Pursuit of a Wound (2000) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the co-founder of the New England Review and a trustee emeritus of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Elizabeth Powell is the author of three poetry collections, a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and an editor of the nationally recognized Green Mountains Review – recently defunded by VTSU. She is an associate professor of writing and literature at Vermont State University-Johnson and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Jensen Beach is the author of two story collections, most recently, Swallowed By The Cold (Graywolf), which was awarded the 2017 Vermont Book Award. He is an Associate Professor in the BFA program at Vermont State University–Johnson, where he is the fiction editor at Green Mountains Review. He was previously on faculty in the MFA programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts and New England College and currently teaches workshops with Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, the Paris Review, and The New Yorker. 

David Mook retired early from a successful business career to pursue a path of learning and creativity. He earned both a B.A. in English and an M.F.A. in Writing after age 50. He began teaching at Castleton in 2005. He has organized poetry events such as “Poets for Peace” and community “Favorite Poem” readings, as well as seminars on poets such as Rilke, Rumi, and Yeats. He has been a featured reader at colleges, libraries, bookstores, and other venues from Vermont to Florida. David leads poetry writing workshops and he has served as a judge in the high school “Poetry Out Loud” competition. He is enthusiastic about helping students find and develop their voices in both writing and speech.

Greg Delanty’s latest collection is The Professor of Forgetting. He is the author and editor of more than twenty poetry books. He teaches at Saint Michael’s College, Vermont. He has lived in Burlington, Vermont since 1986. He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim for poetry. In 2021 he was awarded The David Ferry & Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize. He is considered both a US and Vermont poet as well as an Irish poet and he is a citizen of the US and Ireland. His work is frequently anthologized and broadcast throughout the US and Europe and has reached audiences outside the normal poetry world—recently one of his poems, “The Alien”, appeared in Wes Anderson movie, Asteroid City.

David Cavanagh is the author of five books of poetry, including The Somnambulist and the Good Life. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. A native of Montreal with dual Canadian/American citizenship, he lives in Burlington, Vermont. After many years as an associate dean and chair of Interdisciplinary Studies with Johnson State College (now Vermont State University – Johnson), he now writes full-time.

D. Nurkse is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently A Country of Strangers. He’s the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001.  He’s currently a long-term member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.