2024 Residency Winners
Baja Residency Winner: Christina Fries
Big Bend Residency Winner: Rowena Alegra and Adriana Rambay Fernandez
Breckenridge Residency Winners: Jacqui Devaney, Ashland Hubbard and Rose McMackin
Faulkner Gulf Coast Residency Winner: Sacha Bissonette
Hemingway House Residency Winner: Annie Ellis
Mountain Field Farm Residency Winners: Charlie J. Stephens, Leah Altman, Geri Lipschultz, and Raksha Vasudevan
Santa Fe Residency Winners: Allison Field Bell and Jasmine Khaliq
Wolf House Residency Winners: Cristina Spencer and Emma Binder
Finalists: Corrinne Bollendorf, George Choundas, Nicolette Costanzo, Adrian Fleur, Alexandra Gray, Paige Kaptuch, Ravi Shankar, Wesley Weissberg
Rowena Alegría is Chief Storyteller for the City & County of Denver, founder and director of the Denver Office of Storytelling, a citywide storytelling and cultural preservation project. She was the 2021 Ricardo Salinas Scholar in Fiction at Aspen Words and is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Ragdale, Storyknife, Vermont Studio Center, Writing by Writers, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Elsewhere Studios and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She earned an MFA in Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a member of Sandra Cisneros' Macondo Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in publications including The Rumpus, the Mississippi Review and the Hennepin Review and is upcoming in the We Are the West: Tributaries Anthology. A filmmaker, career journalist, communications executive and speech writer, she is writing a novel that plays with form and the history of the Southwest. She was adopted and raised in Denver.
Leah Altman (Oglala Lakota) is a Native American adoptee and second-generation immigrant. She has written for local and national publications, including Underscore News, Portland Monthly, Oregon Humanities, Portland State University's Metroscape magazine, Parents.com and Indian Country Today. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and has worked for Native and BIPOC-led nonprofit organizations serving families and the environment for over 10 years in fundraising and grant writing. Leah is also an avid pool player, bead worker, fickle hiker, fair-weather kayaker, and mama bear of two young girls.
Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her prose appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Palette Poetry, Superstition Review, South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. She was a 2021 Pushcart nominee, a 2021 Best American Essays Notable, and she has been nominated for Best of the Net 2024. She was the winner of Midway Journal’s 2023 ~1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry contest and the winner of Quarter After Eight's 2021 Short Prose Contest. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Emma Binder is a writer from Wisconsin and a 2023 – 2025 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. They received their MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and were previously a Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. They have received the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Their work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Narrative, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
Sacha Bissonnette is an Afro-Trinidadian, French Canadian short story writer from Ottawa, Canada. He is a reader for Wigleaf Top 50. His work has been nominated twice for Best Small Fictions and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His story 'How We Were Fiction' placed third in the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary competition. His story 'The House Across the Street' was selected for Wigleaf Top 50 2023. His work has appeared in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Cease, Cows, EQMM, Trampset, Terrain.org, Ghost Parachute among other places. He has upcoming short fiction in Bull and in Witness Magazine. He is currently working on a short fiction collection as well as a comic book adaption of one of his short stories with the help of a National Canada Council for the Arts grant, an Ontario Arts Grant and a Youth In Culture Ottawa Grant and was recently selected for the Writer's Union of Canada - BIPOC Writer's Connect mentorship. He loves film, travel and comfort food and 'tweets' @sjohnb9. You can find most of his work at https://www.sachajohnbissonnette.com
Jacqui Devaney is a writer based in Austin, Texas. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Texas State University. Previously, she worked as an editor at the Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. She is a native Texan.
Annie Ellis. I'm Annie. I live in Colorado. I'm a queer woman and a writer. I work full-time (not as a writer). When I'm not working or writing, I prefer to be in the mountains with my dog and my partner. I also sew and quilt and consider my sewing practice my meditation and my art.
Adriana Rambay Fernández is a writer, poet, and artist currently living in England. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars where she was a recipient of the MFA Fiction Prize. She was also a Writers of Immigration and Diaspora Fellow for Jack Jones Literary Arts. Her writing has appeared in the Hennepin Review, Four Way Review, and elsewhere. Born in New Jersey to Dominican immigrants, her writing explores the nature of absence, loss, and intergenerational wounds. Adriana is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
Cristina Fríes is a Colombian-American fiction writer from the San Francisco Bay Area with a Master’s in Creative Writing from UC Davis. Her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review; PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018; Epoch Literary Magazine; Action, Spectacle; and War, Literature & the Arts. She is the recipient of a PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Tin House Scholarship, and is an Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholarship semifinalist and an American Short Fiction semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction prize. Her work has been supported by Disquiet International Literary Program 2023, Sewanee Writers’ Conference 2022, West Edge Opera’s Aperture Artist Residency 2021-2022, Tin House Writer’s Workshop 2019, and Writing by Writers Tomales Bay 2018. She is at work on a collection of short stories and a full-length opera. Her operas have been performed in Atlanta, GA, Sacramento, Berkeley, and San Francisco, CA from 2019-2022. She lives in San Francisco and works as a High School English teacher.
Ashland Hubbard is a writer from Texas. She received a B.S. in film from The University of Texas and is currently a fiction candidate in the MFA Program at Texas State University.
Jasmine Khaliq is a Pakistani Mexican poet born and raised in Northern California. Her work is found or forthcoming in Best New Poets 2023, Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. Her manuscript, Somewhere Horses, was a finalist for the 2022 University of Akron Poetry Prize, the 2023 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for Tupelo Press’ 2021 Berkshire Prize. Currently, Jasmine is a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where she teaches and serves as Editor of Quarterly West.
Rose McMackin’s writing appears in Puerto del Sol, Hobart, Atticus Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, Juked Magazine and others. She is a nonfiction editor at Porter House Review and overthinks country radio in her weekly newsletter "truck songs." She lives in Central Texas with a dog who performs all his own stunts.
Cristina Olivetti Spencer is a writer, translator and educator. Her memoir, About Bliss: Fighting for My Trans Son’s Life, Joy and Fertility is forthcoming from Jessica Kingsley Publishers (an imprint of Hachette Book Group) in October 2024. Her work has appeared in KHÔRA, Scholastic Parent&Child, Spirituality&Health, the anthology entitled A Cup of Comfort for Mothers, and various online publications. She received her MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2019 and her undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies from Harvard in 1994. She is an advocate for gender freedom and diversity, a mother to three awesome kids, and the primary caretaker for her husband who was diagnosed with ALS in August of 2020. She and her family share a home with their four cats in Northern California.
Charlie J. Stephens is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race writer from the Pacific Northwest. Born and raised in Salem, Oregon, Charlie has lived all over the U.S. as a bike messenger, wilderness guide, high school English teacher, and seasonal shark diver (for educational purposes only.) Always encouraged by their grandma and mom to write stories, putting pen to paper has long been a part of their life. Currently living in Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast, they are the owner of Sea Wolf Books & Community Writing Center. Charlie’s short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Best Small Fictions Anthology, New World Writing, Original Plumbing/Feminist Press, and elsewhere. Their debut novel, “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” will be published by Torrey House Press in April 2024.
Raksha Vasudevan was born in India, once a colony of the British empire, and worked for half a decade in international aid, an industry with deep colonial roots. These early experiences sparked my enduring interest in race, migration and colonial legacy—themes that I now explore in my creative nonfiction and reporting. I have reported stories of environmental justice, race and economic progress for The New York Times, VICE, The Guardian, Outside, and High Country News, where I am also a contributing editor. My essays and commentary on colonial legacy, family estrangement and the politics of aid appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, Hazlitt, The Washington Post, and LitHub, among others. My work has been nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a Best of the Net award and listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays 2020 and 2021. All my writing asks: how does colonialism express itself both domestically and abroad, both structurally and within every one of us? What does it mean to be a migrant and ethnic minority, while also being a settler on Indigenous land? What does meaningful solidarity look like across lines of class, race, nationality and geography? In asking and responding to these questions, I intend my work to reach other immigrants and people of color who question traditional notions of family, loyalty and belonging—personally, nationally, globally.
2023 Residency Winners
Baja Residency Winner: Sarah Panlibuton Barnes
Big Bend Residency Winner: Danika Stegeman LeMay
Faulkner Gulf Coast Residency Winner: Agatha Agbanobi and Minrose Gwin
Hemingway House Residency Winner: Margaret Meehan
Mountain Field Farm Residency Winners: Daryl Farmer, Shayne Langford, Sam Schieren and Tyler Wells Lynch
Silicon Valley Residency Winner: Amna Ahmad
The Poconos Residency Winners: Ilana Kramer & Anna Moore
Wolf House Residency Winners: Allison Field Bell, Carolyn Williams-Noren & Karin Killian
Finalists: Alessandra Bautze, Dana Belott, Richard Boada, April Darcy, Elaine Deschamps, Paige Kaptuch, Jennifer Moore, Reema Rajbanshi, Cathy Safiran, Suzy Vitello Soulé, Megan Vorm.
Agatha Agbanobi is a Nigerian-American writer and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consultant for Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations. She has an undergraduate degree in English - Creative Writing from the University of Houston and has studied under the tutelage of Nick Flynn, Anthony Hoagland, Matthew Salesses and Jameelah Lang. She has a Master’s in Education Leadership and has worked in education reform in local school districts and at the state department of education in Texas for over 10 years. She currently lives in San Marcos, Texas and is welcoming a new puppy into her home in February 2023.
Amna Ahmad’s heart belongs to the Sonoran Desert, a place she fell in love with while studying in Tucson and that inspired her graduate degree in botany. Ahmad’s first novel, The Encyclopedia of Hallucinations, explores the fraught navigation of cultural identity through the lens of a young American woman of Pakistani descent. She was awarded an NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center For Fiction for this work and longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Prize. A former Program Director at the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Ahmad curated a series of author events during her tenure. Previously, Ahmad served as a board member for the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC), where she ran writing workshops and organized a literary festival attended by over three hundred authors and emerging writers. Currently, Ahmad works as a freelance writer and an editor with clients that include Google and biotech and life science companies. Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Arizona and Pakistan, Ahmad lives in Brooklyn.
Daryl Farmer is the author of Where We Land, a collection of short stories and Bicycling Beyond the Divide, winner of a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and also named as a Colorado Book Award finalist. He was born in Colorado Springs, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains where he developed a taste for the open road at an early age, and has spent a life roaming the country and writing about its landscapes and people. He has lived in New Mexico, Oregon, New Hampshire, Mississippi and Alaska, among other places. He received a B.A. in physical education from Adams State College (Alamosa, Colorado) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has taught writing at Georgia Tech. University, Stephen F. Austin State University in east Texas and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks where he is currently an assistant professor and director of the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Allison Field Bell is originally from Northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her work has been published in The Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, The Cincinnati Review, Ruminate, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her micro essay, "Girls Are Always" won Quarter After Eight's 2021 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest; her story, “Of the Eating Variety,” which originally appeared in Ruminate, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021; and her essay, “The Body, The Onion: A Balagan,” which originally appeared in Shenandoah, was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2021. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Karin Killian is a writer from Northern Minnesota, though she left the state at age 18, and made stops in Chicago, Mexico, Alaska, New Mexico, Peru, and Ann Arbor before landing in Traverse City, Michigan, where she currently lives with her two daughters. A former Peace Corps Volunteer with undergraduate degrees in International Studies and Spanish, Karin directed a variety of nonprofit and social enterprise projects before earning her MFA in fiction from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Karin's prose has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Sweet, Hobart, Bayou, Hippocampus and Fiction Writers Review, among other places. She has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and her work has been most recently been supported by a Carol Houck Smith Scholarship in 2020, a Bread Loaf Scholarship in 2021 and a residency at the Tofte Lake Center in 2022.
Ilana Kramer is a poet, writer, and therapist based in Berkeley, California. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Lilith Magazine and K’In Literary Journal. Ilana was the 2020 recipient of the Queer-Writer Poet Fellowship. Additionally, she has been the recipient of the 2015 Tomales Bay Writing Fellowship and the recipient of the 2012 Writers Retreat Workshop (WRW) for her novel-in-progress.
Shayne Langford is a writer from rural Northern California. While earning both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing at UC Davis - where he now teaches in English Department - Shayne worked three seasons as a fly fishing guide in Southwestern Colorado, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Some of his work has appeared in the environmental arts journal Terrain.org and is forthcoming in Air/Light.
Margaret Meehan’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Fence, Joyland, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in 2020, where she was awarded the Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. Most recently, she won fifth prize in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, judged by Téa Obreht, and was a finalist for a CINTAS Foundation for Cuban artists fellowship. In 2018, she was a Tin House Scholar.
For the last two decades, Anna B. Moore has been publishing creative nonfiction, essays, and short fiction in a variety of literary journals and magazines, including Shenandoah, Brain Child, American Scholar, and most recently The Missouri Review and The Offing. Her first novel, The Desperate, which she completed with the support of the first Writing by Writers DRAFT! Program, will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2024. She lives in Northern California. Read more of her work at https://www.annabmoore.com/.
Sarah Panlibuton Barnes was raised on the shore of an ancient volcanic lake in the wilds of northern California by two Shakespearean actors. She became a writer whose work has appeared in Catapult, Guernica, Architectural Digest, Man Repeller, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. She now lives in Brooklyn, where she wishes she could see the stars at night.
Sam Schieren grew up in Valley Cottage, New York. He received an MFA from UC Davis in 2020. Sam currently lives in Johnson, Vermont, where he is working on his first novel and a collection of stories. Sam's writing has been published in the Tufts Observer, Guernica, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other publications. He was runner-up for the 2021 Gulf Coast Prize for Fiction. He was awarded Vermont Studio Center’s inaugural Studio Grant in 2022. Sam currently teach Writing and American Literature at Champlain College, in Burlington.
Danika Stegeman LeMay’s work has appeared in 32 Poems, Afternoon Visitor, APARTMENT, Blue Arrangements, CLOAK, Concision, Leavings, The Woodward Review and Word for/ Word, among other places, and is forthcoming in Ethel Zine. Her video poem, “Then Betelgeuse Reappears” was an official selection for the 2021 Midwest Video Poetry Festival. LeMay received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and currently lives in Roseville, MN. LeMay’s debut collection of poems, Pilot (Spork Press, 2020), is an erasure of episode transcripts of the television show Lost, and speaks from a common source through borrowed tongues. Her second book, Ablation, is forthcoming from 11:11 Press. Ablation is an elegy to her mom, who died in 2020, and contains poems, hybrid text, images as windows and thread as a form of healing. Her website is danikastegemanlemay.com.
Tyler Wells Lynch is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in McSweeney's, TulipTree Review, The Rumpus, Porter House Review, Abyss & Apex, The Awl, Vice, Protean, Entropy, Identity Theory, Maine Magazine, HuffPo, and The New York Times, among others. By day he writes about artificial intelligence for the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, and at night he works on a novel he hopes to finish before he dies. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife and their dog Billy.
Carolyn Williams-Noren lets volunteer plants grow; she would be happy to give you a squash or two. Her essays have been in Water-Stone Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and HAS/HAD. She's up to running three miles at a time again. Her lyric essay published in Willow Springs was included on the “Notable Essays” list in Best American Essays 2018. She provides moral and intellectual support to people stressed out by their high school math and biology homework. Her poems have been in AGNI, Boxcar Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, and other journals, and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. A friend said to her recently, "You are really good at ambiguity," and she blushed. Carolyn's two poetry chapbooks are F L I G H T S (2020, Ethel Zine & Press) and Small Like a Tooth (2015, Dancing Girl Press). Her editing clients tend to remark that she is "very thorough." Her past awards include a McKnight Artist Fellowship (2014), two Minnesota State Arts Board grants (2013 and 2016), and a Loft Mentor Award (2010). She lives in Minneapolis.
2022 Residency Winners
Hemingway House Residency Winner: Arvin Ramgoolam
Mountain Field Farm Residency Winners: Les Johnson, Becky Mandelbaum, Brook McClurg and Jen Parsons
San Juan Residency Winners: Adam Swanson and Rebecca Bell-Gurwitz
Silicon Valley Residency Winner: Kelly Shire
Wolf House Residency Winners: Allison Kingsley and DW McKinney
Finalists: Mant Bares, Z Kennedy-Lopez, Brook McClurg, Julia McDaniel, Amanda Merritt, Kim Rogers, July Westhale
Bec Bell-Gurwitz is a writer based in Portland, Oregon, on occupied Chinook land. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Thrice Fiction and their story Hard and Soft Love was recently selected as a finalist for the Southwest Review's Meyerson Fiction Prize. Currently they are working on a novel about two sisters navigating displaced boundaries and loss of each other as they travel across time, country and geology.
Les Johnson is the author or co-author of multiple popular science and science fiction books. By day, Les is the Solar Sail Principal Investigator for the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout mission (planned to launch in 2021) at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He earned his Master's degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN and his Bachelor's Degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. He has numerous peer-reviewed publications and was published in Analog. He is a frequent contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the National Space Society, The World Future Society, and MENSA.
Becky Mandelbaum is the author of THE BRIGHT SIDE SANCTUARY FOR ANIMALS and BAD KANSAS, which received the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the 2018 High Plains Book Award for First Book, and was a Kansas Notable Book in 2018. Her work has appeared in One Story, The Sun, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, Hobart, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and has been featured on Medium. She has received fellowships from Writing by Writers, a residency from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2019 Disquiet Literary Prize in Fiction, the 2020 Missouri Review Editor’s Prize in Fiction, and the 2020 Nelson Algren Award. Originally from Kansas, she currently lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Brook McClurg holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University (Fiction) and an MFA from Rutgers University-Camden (Nonfiction). His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Cagibi, Iron Horse Literary Review, Exposition Review, Wanderlust & others. His Spanish language translations have appeared in the Loch Raven Review. Originally from Southern California, he currently lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.
DW McKinney pens a column, 3 PANELS, for CNMN Magazine. She serves as an Associate Editor for Shenandoah Literary and Senior Nonfiction Columns Editor for Raising Mothers. She was a finalist in the 2020 Remember in November Contest in Creative Nonfiction by Hippocampus Magazine. Nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize, her other honors include the “My Time” Fellowship with The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, the inaugural Shenandoah Fellowship for BIPOC Editors, a fiction residency with The New Southern Fugitives, and a scholarship from The Hellebore Press, in addition to other awards and nominations. She is also a former editor with The Tishman Review and Linden Avenue Literary Journal. McKinney’s writing has been featured in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Narratively, JMWW Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, [PANK], HelloGiggles, and Elite Daily, among others. Born in California, she earned a bachelor’s in Biology from Dominican University of California and a master of arts in Anthropology from Texas State University.
Jen Parsons currently writes from a tar-paper shack sandwiched between multi-million-dollar homes in Telluride, CO. A long time ago, she graduated with a degree in communications from a University with a Big Name, and she worked in film and television until she hated it. Then, she worked in independent bookstores and landed as a book buyer and ski bum in Telluride. She loved it. She felt slightly irresponsible in the ski bum life and moved to Vermont, where she attained a master’s degree in Historic Preservation, which she never used, and married a wonderful man, who died too young. Currently, she maintains the food and emotional needs of two children and writes in the moments they are not all on top of each other in the tar-paper shack.
Arvin Ramgoolam was born in Trinidad and Tobago, raised in Miami Beach, and has lived in Crested Butte, Colorado for 17 years. He is the recipient of the 2020 One Story Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship. He owns and operates Townie Books and Rumors Coffee and Tea House with his wife Danica. Together, they are raising twin daughters at the edge of the Colorado wilderness.
Kelly Shire is a writer who tells most people she's from southeastern Los Angeles County, because they usually haven't heard of Pico Rivera. The landscape and neighborhoods of her native Southern California play a large role in her work and influences, as does family and pop culture, particularly in the form of music.
Allison Snyder Kingsley is a writer living in southwest Colorado. In 2016, she traded a successful legal career in New York for running shoes and a used car and set out to experience the American West.
Adam Swanson’s writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Washington Post, Lambda Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Writing by Writers, Lambda Literary, and the Creative Writing Program at Emerson College. Adam is the Senior Prevention Specialist at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center.
2019 - 2020 Residency Winners
Hemingway House Residency Winner: Kevin Lavelle
Mill House Residency Winners: Tammy Delatorre, Amanda Oliver and Heather Wells Peterson
San Juan Residency Winners: Kelly Thompson and Lia Woodall
Wolf House Residency Winners: Tessa Fontaine and Valarie Reed Hickman
Finalists: Margaret Adams, Crystal Brandt, Amber Caron, Kelly Green, Rose McMackin, Rachel Moulton, Emily Quinian, Julie Stern, Carolyn Supinka, Rebecca Young
Tammy Delatorre is a writer in Los Angeles. Her essay, “Out of the Swollen Sea,” won the 2015 Payton Prize, and her essay, “Diving Lessons,” was awarded the 2015 Slippery Elm Prose Prize. Tammy was also a finalist in the 2015 Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Award, a finalist in the 2012 William Richey Short Fiction Contest, winner of the 2008 River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest, and recognized in various other literary contests. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications. She obtained her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, A New York Times Editors' Choice; A Southern Living Best Book of 2018; An Amazon Editors' Best Book of 2018; A Refinery29 Best Book of 2018; A New York Post Most Unforgettable Book of 2018.
Valerie Reed Hickman lives and writes in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the recipient of a Wolf House Residency and the winner of the 2019 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest.
Kelly Thompson is currently working on a memoir tentatively entitled Ruptures, the story of one woman's journey of single teenage motherhood and out of her family's fundamentalist cult. Persistence in the face of poverty, silence, and erasure ends in identity and power for the narrator and her descendants. Kelly's work has been published or anthologized in BOMB, LARB, Brevity, Yoga Journal, Fatal Flaw, Guernica, Electric Literature, Entropy, Oh Comely, The Rattling Wall, Dove Tales, The Rumpus, Proximity, The Writing Disorder, Witchcraft, Manifest Station, 49 Writers, Coachella Review, Lady Liberty Lit, and other literary journals. She is also the curator and editor for ‘'Voices on Addiction' column at The Rumpus. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado in the sunshine of the spirit. You can follow her on Twitter @stareenite.
Kevin Lavelle started his career in Roger Corman’s film studio in Ireland, where they produced 5 films a year. He worked up from set PA through the editing ranks to editor in under 3 years, becoming the first Irish editor to cut a film in the studio. Seeking fresh challenges, he moved from Galway, Ireland to Los Angeles in 2014.
Amanda Oliver is a writer and librarian. Her writing has been been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, Vox, Medium, and more. She is at work on a book about public libraries and her years working as a librarian in Washington, D.C.
Heather Wells Peterson earned her MFA from the University of Florida in 2014. She also has an MA from Lancaster University and a BA from Brown University. She has lived in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, England, Florida, and Vermont, and she now lives in Los Angeles.
Lia Woodall is an emerging nonfiction writer recently transplanted to Houston from Denver. Her essay, “Torn in Two” can be found in Vol. 15 of South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction + Art, Best American Essays Notable and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her essay, “The Scream” was published in Issue 64 of Sonora Review. “Fallout: A Response to The Fourth State of Matter,” appears online in Issue 89 of Crack the Spine Literary Magazine and was selected for the Winter 2014 print anthology.
2018 -2019 Residency Winners
2018 Mill House Winners: Kathryn Gilmore, Heidi Hutner, Allison Landa and Sarah Grace McCandless
Mill House Finalists: Amy Bess Cook and Austyn Gaffney
2019 Wolf House Winners: Bruna Dantas Lobato and Caitlin Scarano
Wolf House Finalists: Ami Mann and Roseanne Pereira
With head in the clouds and boots wandering the vineyards, Amy Bess Cook is a writer who also works in the wine biz. Her personal essays have appeared in such publications as Vela, Entropy, and Misadventures. In 2015, she launched sirsee: the gift, a harvest arts journal and accompanying handcrafted wine, to raise money for social causes. Her latest initiative, Woman-Owned Wineries, gives voice to hardworking female wine entrepreneurs. She lives in Sonoma, California.
Bruna Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Brazil. A graduate of Bennington College, she received her MFA in Fiction from New York University and is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her stories, essays, and translations from the Portuguese have appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares online, BOMB, The Common, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 A Public Space Fellow.
Austyn Gaffney is a freelance writer and editor based in Kentucky. Her work is published or forthcoming in Brevity, Prairie Schooner, The Offing, onEarth, RANGE, Misadventures, Scalawag, Southerly, and more. Her writing has been supported by the Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Creative Nonfiction Award from the University of Kentucky, and residencies from Brush Creek Arts and PLAYA Summer Lake. She is working on her first book about a lighthouse and a smelter in northern Ontario.
Kathryn Gilmore is a writer, animal-lover, food fanatic, and intrepid world traveler. She is currently living in Oakland, CA with her pit bull rescue Hattie Mae - helping folks out with copywriting, catering and pet care. Kathryn’s writing at Mill House will continue to focus on the healing she has found in the midst of animals. Whether volunteering with lions in Africa, tending to liberated elephants in Cambodia or herding goats on a coastal farm in Northern California, the wisdom and harmony she has gained from being with animals have helped her reconcile her past and start to find her place in this world.
Dr. Heidi Hutner is associate professor of English, Sustainability, and Gender Studies at Stony Book University. She teaches environmental literature and film, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. Her writing includes academic books, as well as essays in anthologies, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Dame, Public Radio International, Spirituality and Health, Tikkun, and Yes! Magazine, among others. Hutner is at work on a narrative nonfiction book, Accidents Can Happen: Voices of Women and Nuclear Disasters, and a companion documentary film of the same name. (@HeidiHutner)
Allison Landa is a Berkeley-based writer of fiction and memoir who earned an MFA in creative writing from St. Mary's College of California. She has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Playa Summer Lake, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and The Julia and David White Artists' Colony.
Sarah Grace McCandless is the creator of Hopeless Semantic, a visual curation of words and her reaction to them, expressed in poetry and prose, inspired by their true definitions, and deeper intentions. She is also the author of two novels, Grosse Pointe Girl: Tales from a Suburban Adolescence and The Girl I Wanted to Be (both with Simon & Schuster), and currently working on a new collection, The Mistakes We Made.
Her short fiction, essays, and articles have been featured in numerous publications, including the anthology Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves. Additionally, Sarah Grace is a former instructor for MediaBistro and Gotham Writers, Mortified performer and former producer, and Back Fence PDX storyteller. Loves include Halloween, infomercials, drugstores, owls (and things with owls on them), her local dance studio Vega Dance Lab in Portland, Oregon, and dogs (all dogs). Foes include cottage cheese, humidity, riding in the back seat, and bare feet. Visit her online at sarahgraciously.com.
Caitlin Scarano is a poet based in northwest Washington, and a PhD candidate in English (creative writing) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was recently selected as a participant in the NSF's Antarctic Artists & Writers Program, and will deploy to McMurdo Station in Antarctica in fall 2018. Her debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017 by Write Bloody Publishing. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com
2017 - 2018 Residency Winners
2017 Mill House Winners: Jane Adair, Henry Alley, Carson Beker, Diane Glazman, and Austin Gray
Mill House Finalists: Phoebe McIlwain Bright, Darcy Casey and Katherine Taylor
2018 Wolf House Winners: Nathaniel Blaesing and Michael Carter
Wolf House Finalists: Kate Axelrod, Michael Cooper, Jen Ferguson and Sarah Leamy
Jane Adair (previously published as Jane Wampler) has been awarded the Poets & Writers magazine Writer’s Exchange Award as well as a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship in poetry. Her poems, which have been nominated twice for a Pushchart Prize, have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, The Hollins Critic, and other journals. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and has taught at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and at The Colorado College.
Henry Alley is a Professor Emeritus of Literature in the Honors College at the University of Oregon. He has four novels, Through Glass (Iris Press, 1979), The Lattice (Ariadne Press, 1986), Umbrella of Glass (Breitenbush Books, 1988), and Precincts of Light (Inkwater Press, 2010). His story collection, The Dahlia Field (Chelsea Station Editions) has just came out this spring. For nearly fifty years, such journals as Seattle Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Webster Review have published his stories. A selection from The Dahlia Field, “Border Guards,” will appear this year in Best of Gay Stories 2017.
Carson Beker is a queer Turkish American Writer, Playwright, Collaborative/Hybrid Artist, and Storyteller. They will be working on Dead Cat Elegy, Nine Tales of UnDrowning; Spectacular Failure, a hybrid-essay collection, and a collaborative project with Diane Glazman. You can find out more about them at TheEscapery.org. They have two cats, one living and one ghost.
As a former Louisiana Army National Guard helicopter pilot, Nathaniel Blaesing spent a year flying in Iraq. Upon redeployment home, during the aftermaths of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he was involved in rescues and searches for bodies in his former home of New Orleans. Now he is learning to piece a life together with his wife and newborn son in the tranquil city of Iowa City, Iowa.
Michael Carter is a poet and clinical social worker currently living in rural Connecticut. He holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MSW from Smith. He was the inaugural Nadya Aisenberg Fellow at the Boston Writing Room and is a two-time Writing By Writers fellow at Tomales Bay. His poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, Boulevard, and Spoon River Poetry Review among many others. He lives with his hounds, Omar and Birdie, and is a competitive swimmer and a non-competitive knitter.
Diane Glazman is an award-winning photographer and writer. Her written work — both fiction and nonfiction — has appeared in numerous publications including VICE LGBTQ, Calyx Journal, the NonBinary Review, Blood + Milk, and sparkle and blink. She holds an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University. While at SFSU, she was a Student Artist-in-Residence at Recology (aka: the San Francisco Dump), for which she created a gallery show of visual and text-based artwork constructed from recycled and repurposed items brought to the dump’s public disposal area. As a freelance writer, she has written on an eclectic range of topics including LGBTQ issues, sexuality, finance, travel, health, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Holocaust survivors, and the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a volunteer with the National Park Service’s Mounted Patrol in the Marin Headlands. Her time in Bend will be spent working on her current novel-in-progress, Ithaka, a contemporary retelling of the Odyssey exploring Penelope’s experiences and reactions after Odysseus returns home, and she will be joined by her Airedales, Oliver and Maggie.
Austin Gray – How does a nice Montana gay boy become the sober, yet character–defect laden guy I see making faces in the mirror? I’ve massed a group of personal essays and poems which explore this question, and the interrelated processes of healing–despite ex-monastery, excessive graduate school, and singing tenor. These works use both memoir and exploration of pertinent behavioral health research, woven into the stories. Organizing this sequence into a coherent book in Bend appeals to me because of the triggering locale. The high desert plains and mountains outside of Great Falls, MT, formed the developmental ecology of my late childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.
2016 - 2017 Residency Winners
2016 Mill House Winners: Kathy Conde, Debra Crawford, Jenny Ferguson, Tori Malcangio and Evelyn Sharenov
Mill House Finalists: Melissa Chadburn, Brandi Henderson, Fatima Policarpo, and Casey Walker
2017 Wolf House Winners: Ky Delaney and Ginger Gaffney
Wolf House Finalists: Jennifer Catto, Elaine Deschamps, Marie Drake, MC Hyland, Karin Killian and Jenny Robertson
Kathy Conde writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her short story, “The Generous Universe,” won the Crab Orchard Review Jack Dyer Fiction Prize 2014. She has won prizes and scholarships from Good Housekeeping, CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts, Writing by Writers, and the Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and has recently been a finalist at Glimmer Train, New Letters, and New Millennium Writings. Her stories and poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, CutThroat, New Poets of the American West, Orbis, Pearl, Pilgrimage, Poetry East, South Dakota Review, Underground Voices,Word Riot, and others. Kathy earned an MFA at Naropa University and is past associate editor for Bombay Gin, Naropa’s literary magazine.
Debra Crawford has been a journalist, editor, and public relations professional for thirty years. From her start as an editor in solar energy research, she’s become the public relations director for an art museum, a private school, and a college, as well as a journalist in Hong Kong. Debbie has written for the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg and Pacific Rim news services, the Japan Times newspaper, numerous Asian magazines, and the editorial pages of The Denver Post. She is co-facilitator of the Glenwood Springs (Colorado) Writers’ Workshop. Her current project is a memoir about her years in Hong Kong, interwoven with her grandmother’s experiences living in China after World War II.
Jenny Ferguson holds a PhD from the University of South Dakota. During the residency, Jenny will be working on a novel set in the border regions (US/Mexico and US/Canada) of near-future North America, chronologically moving back and forth between a time where access to oil is limited and a time where oil–and the world it produced–is almost a memory. Her first novel, BORDER MARKERS, a collection of linked flash fiction narratives is now available from NeWest Press (2016).
Tori Malcangio’s stories can be found or are forthcoming in: the Mississippi Review, Tampa Review, Cream City Review, ZYZZYVA, River Styx, Passages North, Smokelong Quarterly, Pearl Magazine, Literary Mama, The San Diego Reader, and VerbSap, as well as the anthologies: A Year in Ink and The Frozen Moment. She is also the winner of the 2011 Waasmode Fiction Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and an MFA candidate at Bennington College.
Evelyn Sharenov’s stories, essays and poetry have been published in theNew York Times, Glimmer Train, Etude, Mediphors, Fugue, CrossConnect, NYQ, The Bear Deluxe and many other literary journals; she has been short-listed for Best American Short Stories and has received both Oregon Literary Arts and Oregon Arts Commission grants, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. She blogs at Psychology Today, reflective essays on working with the mentally ill population in Portland, OR, and her collection, ‘Notes From Bedlam’ is due out in 2014. Her essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in numerous major anthologies, the Oregonian Newspaper, Willamette Week and Bitch Magazine. She is currently writing a novel based in Oregon and infused with magic realism.
2015 Mill House Residency Winners
Winners: Kate Axelrod, Julie Comins, Aja Gabel, Jamie Kravitz and Katie MacBride.
Finalists: Courtney Carlson, Lainie Deschamps, Robert Hill and Homa Mojtabai
Kate Axelrod was born and raised in New York City. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn and works as an advocate in the criminal justice system. The Law of Loving Others, her debut novel, was published in January 2015. Kate is currently working on a collection of stories.
As a freelance writer, Julie Comins has contributed hundred of articles to a variety of publications in the Rocky Mountain region. She is a longtime contributing editor at Aspen Sojourner magazine and a former executive director of the literary nonprofit Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. Before becoming an arts administrator and writer, her professional credits included actress, waitress, theatre producer and restaurateur. Originally from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Julie is working on a memoir about her father. She lives in Basalt, Colorado with her husband and son.
Aja Gabel’s prose has appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Southeast Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She attended Wesleyan University and has an MFA from the University of Virginia and a PhD in fiction from the University of Houston. During her time at the Mill House Residency, she will be working on her second novel.
For most of her adult life Jamie Kravitz has worked for Aspen Words, a literary program of the Aspen Institute, midwifing writers’ dreams. In addition to putting on annual writers conferences, organizing a writing residency in Woody Creek, CO, and hosting monthly author readings, Jamie is a Colorado Book Awards judge. She has been working on a novel in 20-minute early-morning increments since last November and will be spending her time in Bend revising and shaping that funky first draft. Jamie’s writing has appeared in regional publications like The Aspen Times, as well as Mothering, SNOW, and Resorts & Great Hotels magazines.
Katie MacBride is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Addiction.com, Alternet.org, The Bold Italic, Drunk Monkeys, and Substance.com, among other publications. She has been working on a young adult novel for the past two years and is thrilled to have the opportunity to revise her completed draft at the Mill House Residency. She will be heading to Bend with her trusty companion, Sally, a Chihuahua-Terrier mix who will do everything in her power to encourage Katie to stop writing and take naps. You can read Katie’s work at http://www.katiemacbride.com; she occasionally tweets at @msmacb.