Discipline: Literature

Fran Castan

Discipline: Literature
Region: Amagansett, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1985
Fran Castan is a writer and poet. She has worked as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, an editor at Scholastic Magazines, and as editorial director of Learning Corporation, the former educational subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. As a freelancer, her work appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Education Digest, and on WNET. For 25 years, she taught writing and literature at The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Fran Castan began writing poetry at the age of 40 and earned an M.A. in creative writing at New York University. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Poetry, Heliotrope, and Ms and has been anthologized in Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (N.Y.U. Press); Seasons of Women (Norton); From Both Sides Now: The Vietnam War, and Its Aftermath in Poetry (Scribner/Simon & Schuster); On Prejudice: A Global Perspective (Anchor/Doubleday); and The Light of City and Sea (Street Press). She has received the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Award Best Long Island Poet 2013; Lucille Medwick Award, Poetry Society of America; and ten Pushcart Prize nominations.

Studios

Van Zorn (formerly Kirby)

Fran Castan worked in the Van Zorn (formerly Kirby) studio.

Constructed thanks to a bequest from Sarah L. Kirby, Kirby Studio was the last new building to be erected during Mrs. MacDowell’s leadership (1907-1951). The load-bearing masonry walls were laid by local mason Augustus Beaulieu atop a fieldstone foundation. A 1995 renovation preserved the brick fireplace with wooden mantel and…

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