The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia was founded in 2008 in an effort to nurture the literary arts by offering talented individuals both a comfortable and rich cultural environment in which to immerse themselves, and a substantial amount of time in which to begin or further significant projects. Thus, each year, a single poet, playwright, or writer of fiction is offered a month-long residency at the gorgeous Hotel Bergs in historic Riga.

Congratulations to Salvatore Scibona, who has been awarded a 2012 PEN/O. Henry Prize for his short story, "The Woman Who Lived in the House", written on his Baltic Residency, and which first appeared in A Public Space, and will be included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 (Coming in April 2012 from Anchor Books).

Kyle McCord is the author of three books of poetry: Galley of the Beloved in Torment (Dream Horse Press, 2009), a co-written book of epistolary poems entitled Informal Invitations to a Traveler (Gold Wake Press, 2011) and Sympathy from the Devil forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in 2013. He has work featured in Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Journal, Catch-Up, Gulf Coast, Volt and elsewhere. His critical work has appeared in Diode, Rattle, and Pleiades where he is a regular reviewer. He’s received grants or awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Iowa Poetry Association. Along with Wendy Xu, he is a co-founder of the Younger American Poets Reading Series and co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. He is a teaching fellow in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. READ MORE >>