Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Residency Alumni
2025 Winners
Zite Ezeh
Zite Ezeh (she/they) is a Nigerian-Kenyan-American writer, musician, and educator who uses words to understand the vastness of herself and the world around her. Her recent literary work braids indigenous Igbo cosmologies with elements of today’s world. She is particularly interested in how her characters carve out slices of home for themselves—often against the backdrop of a world that has othered them. Currently, Zite is an MFA candidate in Fiction at UC Riverside and an incoming resident at Vermont Studio Center. They received the 2024 Abraham Polonsky Endowed Award, and their flash fiction piece, “The Ruins,” was published by Beyond Worlds magazine in 2023. @zite.ezeh
Irene Jiang
Irene Jiang (she/her) is a Chinese-American filmmaker and writer of genre and literary fiction. She writes about unruly outsider women who navigate migration and aspiration with feminine rage. Her short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Pinch Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Uncharted Magazine, and 101 Words, and her personal essays can be read in Joysauce and The New York Times. She is revising her first novel, “Immoral Purposes,” about a young Chinese woman in 1880s California who escapes sex trafficking and seeks revenge on her abusers. Irene is a Pacific Northwest native, a Northwestern University graduate, and a Fulbright Morocco alum. Her past lives include food journalist, circus groupie, and bourbon steward. She works as a private tutor and a script consultant in Los Angeles. irenejiang.com/@burgerbint
Lizzy Beck
Lizzy Beck (she/her) lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Grist, Pleiades, Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is at work on her first collection of poems. www.lizzybeck.com
Michele Bombardier
Michele Bombardier's debut collection “What We Do” was a Washington Book Award finalist. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Bainbridge Island, Washington and the 2024 winner of the NORward Prize in Poetry. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Mineral School, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Recent work has appeared in JAMA, Atlanta Review, Parabola, New Ohio Review, Crab Creek Review, SWWIM and others. Founder of Fishplate Poetry, Michele teaches workshops and leads retreats in support of humanitarian work, specifically medical care in the Middle East and Gaza. Michele is active in narrative medicine, bringing poetry to healthcare professionals.
Melenie Freedom Flynn
Melenie Freedom Flynn is a writer, actor, and teacher. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Djerassi Residents Artists Program, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Melenie’s essay “Message from Your Inmate” won the annual nonfiction contest at Vela Magazine and her recent work can be seen in Provincetown Arts Magazine. A graduate of the MFA Acting Program at California Institute of the Arts, she has performed in theatres across the country. Melenie leads writing workshops at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop and provides coaching and editorial services for writers. She lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and is a proud member of Straw Dog Writers Guild. Visit her at meleniefreedomflynn.com
Michael Jerome Plunkett
Michael Jerome Plunkett (he/him) served in the United States Marine Corps. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to building libraries on military bases. He also hosts its podcast, The LitWar Podcast, which has featured notable guests such as Elliot Ackerman, Emily St. John Mandel, Phil Klay, and Karl Marlantes. He led the Patrol Base Abbate Book Club, which has welcomed distinguished speakers like Sebastian Junger, Ocean Vuong, and Kaveh Akbar. His writing has appeared in The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The War Horse, Leatherneck Magazine, Coffee or Die, Dirtbag Magazine, and Lethal Minds Journal. His debut novel, “Zone Rouge,” is forthcoming from Unnamed Press.www.michaeljeromeplunkett.com @michaeljeromeplunkett.
Mason Wray
Mason Wray (he/him) is a poet from Georgia. A graduate of the MFA program at Ole Miss, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, RHINO, New Ohio Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Diode, and others. He’s received support from organizations including Bread Loaf and the Hambidge Center. He serves as a poetry editor at Bear Review and lives in Atlanta. @masefacetheace.
Thaddeus Haas
Thaddeus Haashas lived many different lives, from academic philosopher, to wildland firefighter, to acupuncturist, and in each one of these, writing has given him a way to make sense of his experience. It is only now, as he enters his fifth decade, that he has dared to think of himself as a writer. From a hamlet in Upstate New York, he spends his days working on an assortment of projects in between his son’s school drop offs and pickups. His current focus is a memoir of sorts about his years working as an elite wildland firefighter in Western Montana. https://thaddeusharjeet.substack.com/
Brenton Sizwe Zola
Brenton Sizwe Zola is a first-generation writer, interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Informed by experiences of childhood homelessness, global travel, and a lineage of African spiritual leaders, his work examines themes of myth, spirit and sanctity. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, Inc., American Theatre, Boulevard, Prism, and WBUR Boston, among others. He is a recipient of the Marianne Russo Award for a Novel-in-Progress at the Key West Literary Seminar, an Adult Fiction mentorship at The Wordand his poem “Multiplicity” is one of the official poems of the City of Denver. Zola was an inaugural member of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator, a Writing in Color Retreat fellow at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and a fellow at UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture, where he received his MFA.brentonzola.com and @thezolab everywhere
2024 Winners
Camila Sanmiguel Anaya
Camila Sanmiguel Anaya is a Mexican-American poet born and raised on the southern border. She graduated from Harvard University in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts in History & Literature, taking workshops with Jorie Graham and Josh Bell. Sanmiguel Anaya was the 2017 National Student Poet for the Southwest—one of five students receiving the highest honor in the country for youth poets—and worked with young refugees and advocates for immigrant children as part of her service. She won second place in the 2023 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. She is an alumna of Harvard’s Signet Society, an artists’ society.
Eleanor Fuller
Eleanor Fuller recently completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to volunteer as a fiction reader on the editorial board at Prism International. She is the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and a finalist in The Fiddlehead’s2023 fiction contest. Her stories appear in The Moth, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. Fuller's work has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto.
Jason Prokowiew
Jason Prokowiew is a 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant winner for Literary Oral History for his braided memoir War Boys. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. His writing has appeared in Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, and on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, Monson Arts, and the Mass Cultural Council. He runs his law office dedicated to disability advocacy and lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband.
Jenn Alandy Trahan
Jenn Alandy Trahan was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. A first-generation college graduate, she received her BA in English from the University of California, Irvine, her MA in English, and her MFA in Fiction from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Trahanis a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she was a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction.
Julia Thacker
Julia Thacker’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and The New Republic. Twice a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th-anniversary issue of Poetry International. Her collection, All the Flowers Are for Me, was a finalist in the 2023 National Poetry Series. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Mariah Rigg
Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. Her work has been published in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Catapult, and elsewhere, and has received support from MASS MoCA, the Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Mariah’s prose chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle was published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press in 2023. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Mistinguette Smith
Writing about race, land, and kinship is Mistinguette Smith’s purpose and joy. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pluck!,Abandon Journal, the Black LGBT anthologies DoesYour Mama Know, and Other Countries: Voices Rising. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories about the lives of one Black family during the uprisings for Civil Rights/Black Power, a love letter from the movements for racial justice in the mid-1960s to those of today. You can find her writing in Oberlin, Ohio, or at MistinguetteSmith.com.
Stevie Billow
Stevie Billow (they/them) is a writer, educator, and creative organizer originally from rural Vermont. They hold a BA from Smith College and an MAT from the Universidad de Alcalá. Stevie is a 2023-2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at GrubStreet and the founder of Rotary Arts, an interdisciplinary arts collective for and by emerging LGBTQ+ creatives. Stevie’s writing has appeared in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Fauxmoir, The Blood Pudding, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, and elsewhere. You can find Stevie on Instagram @wollibs and at steviebillow.com.
Whitney Scharer
Whitney Scharer is the author of The Age of Light, a national bestseller named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour, Real Simple, Booklist, and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and was published in over a dozen countries. Whitney is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship and has been awarded residencies at VCCA and Ragdale. She lives with her family in Arlington, MA, where she is working on her second novel.
2023 Winners
Cat Wei
CAT WEI is a poet working in healthcare in Brooklyn, New York; she is an active advocate for poetry in her community as the organizer of East Village Poetry Salon, a reading series that centers on female, queer, and trans poets of color. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award, an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow, and Tin House Workshop alumni. Wei’s writing was Best of the Net nominated and appears in Gulf Coast, Vagabond City, Sundog Lit, and Lantern Review.
Emily Atkinson
EMILY ATKINSON is a writer and public defender born and raised in Illinois; she earned her MFA in Playwriting from Smith College and a J.D. and M.A. in English Literature from Boston University. She is currently working on a novel workshopped at the Colgate Writers’ Workshop, two Tin House Summer Workshops, and a Tin House Winter Workshop. Atkinson's published work appears in Electric Literature, PopMatters, and HuffPost. She lives in western Massachusetts with her dog, Marlowe.
Emily Kiernan
EMILY KIERNAN is the author of the novel, Great Divide (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Pank, The Collagist, Redivider, Quarterly West, X-R-A-Y, and numerous other journals. She has received support from MacDowell, The Ucross Foundation, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Tin House Summer Workshop, and The Community of Writers. She holds an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts and serves as a prose editor at Noemi Press.
Katherine Easer
KATHERINE EASER was born in Kansas City, Kansas, the daughter of a Chinese mother from Taiwan and an American father of European ancestry. After earning a BA from Smith College, she studied creative writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. In 2011, her young adult novel, Vicious Little Darlings, was published by Bloomsbury. Her short story, “Parade of Cats,” a third-place winner in Glimmer Train’s 2017 Fiction Open, appeared in the magazine’s Winter 2018 issue. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Keeonna Harris
KEEONNA HARRIS is a writer, storyteller, mother of five, and prison abolitionist. She received her Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Her dissertation, “Everybody Survived but Nobody Survived: Black Feminism, Motherhood, and Mass Incarceration,” used ethnography and autoethnography to document the experiences of Black mothers navigating the process of visitation and incarceration. Her memoir, Mainline Mama, forthcoming in 2024 from Amistad Press, draws from her experiences as a Black woman, a teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner, building community in the borderlands of the prison. An excerpt from her memoir is available on Salon.com.
Lindsay Rockwell
LINDSAY ROCKWELL is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She’s published, or forthcoming in, BlazeVOX, Connecticut River Review, Amethyst Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Willawaw, among others. Her first collection of poems, GHOST FIRES, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag press in spring/summer 2023. She won first prize in the October Project Poetry Contest and 81st Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Lindsay holds a Master of Dance and Choreography from NYU’s Tisch School of Arts and is an oncologist.
Mario Giannone
MARIO GIANNONE received a Bachelor's in English with a minor in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Giannone served as an assistant fiction editor for Epoch Magazine and taught creative writing and composition for Cornell University’s Department of Literatures in English and the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He teaches writing for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. Giannone’s short fiction appears in Third Coast, Indiana Review, and Blue Mesa Review, and his story “Heaven is a Disk,” published in Indiana Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Martha Pham
MARTHA PHAMis a writer from Massachusetts. A 2022 Tin House Scholar, she holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After the Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Residency Program, Pham will attend the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, where she will tend to a novel in progress. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Nurture, Serious Eats, and elsewhere.
Parvati Ramchandani
PARVATI RAMCHANDANI is a recently retired physician looking forward to bringing long-stalled writing projects to fruition. She has published short fiction and creative nonfiction pieces in literary magazines, including Peregrine, Asian Pacific American Journal, and Bucks County Writer. Ramchandani won an award from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts for fiction writing. Two of her creative nonfiction pieces relating to her work as a physician are slated for publication in an anthology of writings by Women Physicians titled This Side of Doctoring (Eliza Chin, MD, and Anju Goel, Eds.), to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.