BOOKS, STORIES, COMMUNITY
WATERVILLE I PORTLAND I ONLINE
2022 Featured Authors and Speakers
And Special Guests
Pious Ali
Pious Ali
A dedicated public servant, assertive and pragmatic leader with a compassionate diversified skill set in community organizing, activism and civic engagement, Pious is a Youth and Community Engagement Specialist at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service 's Portland Empowered and has spent the better part of his career focused on community engagement. He has created a meaningful and ongoing dialogue across cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, and faith-based barriers.
Samaa Abdurraqib
Samaa Abdurraqib
Samaa is the executive director of the Maine Humanities Council. She lives in Portland with her cat, Stashiell Hammett, Resident Charmer & Most Attractive Feline In The World. She enjoys birding, hiking and being outdoors, and coaching leaders of color. She is an Outdoor Afro leader in Portland, Maine, and has been connecting with Black people in the outdoors for over three years. Samaa also loves writing and has recently returned to writing poetry and creative non-fiction after a 15 year hiatus. She’s recently published her first chapbook, Each Day Is Like an Anchor (2020).
Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, with the sequel, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, coming April 2022. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Jason Anthony
Jason Anthony
Jason C. Anthony was born in Maine in 1967, attended school and Clark University in Massachusetts, and earned his MA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Soon thereafter, he fled the warm world for Antarctica, where he worked in the United States Antarctic Program for eight austral summers as a Waste Management Specialist, Fuels Operator, Cargo Handler, Skiway Groomer, and Camp Supervisor. Anthony filled his Antarctic notebooks with the raw material for lyric essays, essays, and articles, some twenty three of which have been published since he last left the ice in 2004. His work has been featured in several publications, including Orion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and The Smart Set. One Antarctic essay was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2007, and another was a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2006.
Anthony's essay "Hoosh," published in the literary food journal Alimentum, inspired his first book, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine (University of Nebraska Press). Hoosh, a narrative and culinary history of Antarctica, won a 2012 Andre Simon Food and Drink Book Award, a 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year Award (Travel), a Silver Medal in the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Creative Nonfiction), and was a finalist for a 2013 Maine Literary Award (Nonfiction). The New York Times Book Review called Anthony “a fine, visceral writer and a witty observer," and The Independent (UK) described Hoosh as "one of the most enthralling studies of gastronomy ever published."
Anthony is the 2014 Literary Fellow for Maine, thanks to a fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. He lives in midcoast Maine with his wife, the singer-songwriter Heather Hardy.
Kristen Arnett
Kristen Arnett
Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. Her next book (an untitled collection of short stories) will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House). She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and currently lives in Miami, Florida. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett
She is represented by Pande Literary Agency.
Kerri Arsenault
Kerri Arsenault
Kerri Arsenault is co-founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University (TESS), contributing editor at Orion magazine, book critic, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Mill Town was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and top book pick for the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah magazine, People, Newsweek, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
For 2022–2023, Arsenault will be a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, where she will be working on two biography projects that orbit around her primary interest: the lives of ordinary people and their intersection with waste, pollutants, and toxicities.
Joshua Bennett
Joshua Bennett
Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2021, he received the Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.
Bennett has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.
Bennett’s writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic, and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the recipient of the 2018 Maine Literary Award; the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver; and the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Linda Pastan. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Grist, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Professor Jennifer Finney-Boylan, author of eighteen books, is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.
She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the nonprofit advocating for authors, readers, and freedom of expression. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the Board of Directors of GLAAD; she was co-chair of GLAAD’s board of directors from 2013-17. She also is a member of the faculty of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College, and the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy.
For many years she was a Contributing Opinion Writer for the opinion page of the New York Times; she has also been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
Her most recent book is the memoir Good Boy: My Life in 7 Dogs, published by Celadon/Macmillan in April of 2020. Her next book project is the novel Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult, slate for publication in autumn of 2022 by Ballantine/Random House.
Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders (Broadway/Doubleday/Random House) was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. A novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, she is also a nationally known advocate for human rights. Jenny has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show on four occasions; Live with Larry King twice; the Today Show, the Barbara Walters Special, NPR’s Marketplace and Talk of the Nation; she has also been the subject of documentaries on CBS News’ 48 Hours and The History Channel. She served as an advisor to the television series Transparent.
She lives in New York City, and in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie. They have a son, Sean and a daughter, Zai.
Sarah Braunstein
Sarah Braunstein
Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W. W. Norton), winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Fiction. The novel was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick of the Month. Bitch magazine said it's a novel "akin to the film Magnolia (if Saul Bellow had written the novelization)."
Sarah’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and in other publications. She co-wrote a play, String Theory: Three Greek Myths Woven Together, with Michael Barakiva and Amy Boyce Holtcamp.
Sarah has been the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. For several years she served on the National Selection Panel of the National YoungArts Foundation.
Sarah holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work.
She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College.
Gregory Brown
Gregory Brown
Gregory Brown grew up along Penobscot Bay and still lives in Maine with his family. His work often explores the interaction of land and human influence, with a particular interest on social, cultural, and environmental issues in rural communities.
His short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Epoch, and Narrative Magazine, where he was a winner of the 30Below Prize. His non- fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, American Short Fiction, The Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, and The Millions. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
His debut novel, The Lowering Days, was a Publishers Marketplace 2021 Buzz Book, a Goodreads best debut novel, a Library Journal best debut novel, longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and won an AudioFile Magazine Earphones award.
Gillian Burnes
Gillian Burnes
Gillian Burnes’s stories have appeared in Glimmer Train and The Dillydoun Review, and her non-fiction work in Outside, OnEarth, Wilderness, and other magazines. She lives with her husband and daughter on the edge of her in-laws’ organic cattle farm in central Maine. Soft Features is her first novel.
Kat Brzozowski
Kat Brzozowski
Kat Brzozowski is a senior editor at Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan Childrens Publishing Group. She has edited a wide range of young adult fiction, including Anna-Marie McLemore’s When the Moon was Ours, which received a Stonewall Honor and was longlisted for a National Book Award, and new Fear Street books in R.L. Stine’s best-selling series, which has sold over eighty million copies worldwide. She’s also the editor for Tony Award-winning Leslie Odom Jr’s Failing Up. Kat is looking to acquire young adult fiction across a wide range of genres, especially contemporary, realistic YA with a strong hook; dark, contemporary fiction, mysteries, suspense and thrillers; and sci-fi and fantasy that’s mostly rooted in this world. She is especially interested in YA with crossover appeal, characters from marginalized backgrounds, and strong voices.
Marpheen Chan
Marpheen Chann
As a gay, first-generation Asian American born in California to a Cambodian refugee family and later adopted by an evangelical, white working-class family in Maine, Marpheen uses a mix of humor and storytelling to help people view topics such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through an intersectional lens.
Marpheen is the author of a memoir titled “Moon in Full” coming out June 2022 from Islandport Press.
Marpheen Chann has a strong commitment to public service and serves as:
- At-Large Charter Commissioner, City of Portland, Maine (Elected)
- President, Cambodian Community Association of Maine
- Member, Maine Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
- Member, Planning Board for the City of Portland, Maine
- Board Member, Equality Community Center in Portland, Maine
Marpheen Chann lives in Portland, Maine. He works in the nonprofit and advocacy sector and holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Southern Maine and a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law.
Chelsea Conaboy
Chelsea Conaboy
Chelsea is a journalist who writes about personal and public health. She was part of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, and her magazine writing has been published by Mother Jones, Politico, the Week, the Boston Globe Magazine, and others. Her first book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, will be published by Henry Holt & Co. in September 2022. She lives in Maine with her husband and their two children.
Susan Conley
Susan Conley
Susan is the author of five critically-acclaimed books, including her newest, best-selling novel Landslide — A New York Times “Editor’s Choice”, a TODAY Show “Summer Read,” a “Best Book” by Good Morning America, The New York Post, Medium, Bustle, Biblio Lifestyle and others, as well as a Maine NPR Bookclub Pick. Her previous, best-selling novel, Elsey Come Home, was a Most Anticipated/Best Book at Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Pop Sugar, Huffington Post, Southern Living, Fodors, and an “Editor’s Choice” at Amazon. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Lithub, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, and others. She’s been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She's won the Maine Book Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence and has been a featured Tedx Speaker, where her talk the "Power of Story," has been viewed widely. She’s taught at colleges and international art-residencies including Emerson College, Colby College, The University of Massachusetts, as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Fellow, The Haystack School, The Spannochia Foundation, La Napoule Foundation, and The Beijing Hutong. She’s on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program and is co-founder of the Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids in Portland, Maine.
Rob Costello
Rob Costello
Rob Costello (he/him) is a queer man who writes contemporary and dark speculative fiction with a queer bent for and about young people. His work has appeared in The Dark, The No Sleep Podcast, Hunger Mountain, Stone Canoe, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Narrative, and Rural Voices:15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America.
He holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is an alumnus of Millay Arts. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and has served on the faculty of the Whole Novel Workshop at the Highlights Foundation since 2014. He lives and works in Ithaca, NY with his husband and their dogs. Find out more at www.cloudbusterpress.com or on Twitter @CloudbusterRob.
Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor.
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Leigh Ellis
Leigh Ellis
Leigh Ellis is an eighteen year-old from Raymond, Maine and author of the young adult magical realism novel, Bach in the Barn. Leigh grew up writing at the Telling Room, and their work has been featured in Telling Room anthologies See Beyond and Shadowboxing. Though no longer a student, they hope to stay involved with the Telling Room and similar organizations in the future. Leigh is attending Columbia University with a major in creative writing and is passionate about queer representation and advocacy. Their goal is to continue sharing the stories they needed to hear growing up, as well as helping others to do the same. Leigh is also in the process of compiling a zine of queer writing called Frisson, based on the scientific term for “getting the chills.” When not writing, Leigh can often be found collaging, taking pictures of street art, and making Spotify playlists.
Isaac Fitzsimons
Isaac Fitzsimons
Isaac Fitzsimons (Fits-EYE-mons) writes so that every reader can see themselves reflected in literature. His debut novel, The Passing Playbook, received numerous accolades including being named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection, a Summer/Fall 2021 Indies Introduce title, a Kirkus Best Young Adult Book of 2021, and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
Isaac has previously dabbled in performing sketch comedy and learning how to play three songs on the banjo. His dream vacation would be to travel around Europe via sleeper train and see every top-tier soccer team play a home game. He currently lives outside Washington, DC.
Gillian French
Gillian French
Thanks for stopping by! I’m a ridiculous, sometimes cranky, often hungry, frequently writing flibbertigibbet who really hopes she can keep doing this for a living. In case you weren’t sure, my name is pronounced with a soft G sound, as in “gelato.” (Better known soft G Gillians: Gillian Anderson, Gillian Flynn, Gillian Welch, etc.)
My debut novel, Grit (HarperTeen), was an Indie Next List pick, a Junior Library Guild Selection, received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and ALA Booklist, was an Edgar Award Finalist, a South Carolina Young Adult Book Award Finalist, and received both a 2018 Lupine Award from the Maine Library Association and a 2018 Maine Literary Award from the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
My other novels include The Door to January (Islandport Press; Bram Stoker Award Finalist), The Lies They Tell (HarperTeen; 2018 Junior Library Guild Selection2019 International Thriller Award Finalist, an Amazon Bestselling New Release in both print and audio editions, 2019 Maine Literary Award Winner), The Missing Season (HarperTeen; 2019 Junior Library Guild Selection, starred review from Booklist), and my upcoming novel for teens, Sugaring Off (Algonquin Young Readers, 11/1/22). My short fiction has placed in Writer’s Digest and Zoetrope: All Story contests, as well as appearing in such publications as Weirdbook.
I hold a BA in English from the University of Maine, and I’m a member of The Authors Guild, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and the Mystery Writers of America. I’ve also served as a judge for multiple literary awards, including the Edgar Awards. Currently, I live in my native state of Maine with my husband and three young sons, where I’m perpetually agonizing over my next novel (in the best possible way, of course!)
I’m represented by Alice Tasman of Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.
Peggy Grodinsky
Peggy Grodinsky
Peggy Grodinsky is Food Editor and Books Editor at the Portland Press Herald. Previously, she was for five years executive editor of Cook’s Country, a Boston-based national magazine published by America’s Test Kitchen. She spent several years in Texas as food editor at the Houston Chronicle. Grodinsky has taught food writing to graduate students at New York University and Harvard Extension School. She worked for seven years at the James Beard Foundation in New York, and her stories have appeared in Best of Food Writing (2017) and Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing (2008). Her story “Is the Well at Jordan Farm the most pandemic proof restaurant in Maine?” took second place in Maine Press Association 2021 awards, features category.
Margaret Hathaway
Margaret Hathaway
Margaret Hathaway is the author of the memoir The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese, the guides Living With Goats: Everything You Need to Know to Raise Your Own Backyard Herd and Food Lovers' Guide to Maine, and the cookbook, the Portland, Maine Chef's Table: Extraordinary Recipes from Casco Bay. A native of Wichita, Kansas, Margaret is a graduate of Wellesley College and a former Fulbright scholar to Tunisia. She worked in book publishing and as a manager of New York City's famed Magnolia Bakery before settling with her husband, Karl Schatz, and their three daughters on Ten Apple Farm, a homestead in southern Maine where they tend dairy goats, assorted poultry, a large garden, and a small orchard.
Tanuja Desai Hidier
Tanuja Desai Hidier
Boston-born author/singer-songwriter Tanuja Desai Hidier moved to NYC where she interned at The Paris Review, hostessed at a Tex-Mex restaurant, secretaried for the Whitney Museum’s Film & Video Department, walked a moody saluki (who once escaped and sent her on a 100mph Central Park chase), co-hosted streaming music program DesiVibe (til the Internet bubble popped), anchored an Indian news show (mispronouncing key headline words), party-promoted, copyedited/wrote for teen mags (“Quiz: Is He Really That Into You?”), sobbed into her pillow, laughed until she fell over, danced like no one was watching (and likely no one was), wrote/directed/festival-ated short film “The Test”, and front-woman’d punk-pop band io, regularly gigging at CBGBs, Mercury Lounge, the Elbow Room, and Bitter End—i.e, she assiduously avoided writing a novel (trans-Atlantically, too, for a year in Paris).
It was only when she moved to London for a couple years (which turned into 17, during which time she birthed daughters with British accents) that the tale of protagonist Dimple Lala grew clear. Born Confused, Tanuja’s pioneering debut, considered to be the first South Asian American YA novel, was written largely from a Portobello Road flat overlooking the fruit/veg stalls, Intoxica Records, and a betting joint.
Tanuja has also made two albums of original songs based on Born Confused and the award-winning sequel Bombay Blues. She recently wrote the foreword to Untold: Defining Moments of the Uprooted, a nonfiction anthology featuring 31 new Brown womxn writers. Her piece, Sooji, Sakar, Badam, Ghee, was this August included in Pen America’s India At 75 anthology, a historic collection by authors from India/the Indian diaspora reflecting on India’s 75th year of Independence. Motherland, her prose poem in honor of her mother, can be found in Moonglade, in the current issue of Amjambo Africa.
She is now based in Maine, where she serves on the Board of Directors of The Telling Room.
Abdi Nor Iftin
Abdi Nor Iftin
Born in Mogadishu to nomadic parents, Abdi Nor Iftin survived famine, war, and child soldiering. Thanks to the movies available to him, he taught himself English by watching American action films. By repeating and imitating the carefree actors, he earned himself the nickname “Abdi American”. Through guerrilla journalism, Abdi dispatched stories about his life to a series titled Messages From Mogadishu on American Public Media. His stories were short listed for Peabody Awards in 2016. These stories were later picked by NPR, the BBC and later This America.
After surviving a bombing at his house one evening in 2009, Abdi finally said goodbye to his home country and moved to Kenya where he and his brother lived as refugees. In an amazing stroke of luck, he won entrance to the U.S. in August 2014, in the annual visa lottery, though his route to America—ending in a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi—did not come easily.
Now a bestselling and award-winning author based in the state of Maine. Featured on CNN, NPR, NYT, Washington Post, The Boston Globe. Abdi is an advocate for refugee and immigrant rights. He is dedicated to bringing people together through his stories of survival and resilience. He is currently working on a documentary based on his memoir Call Me American.
Eleanor Jackson
Eleanor Jackson
Eleanor Jackson has been agenting since 2002. Previously, she was an agent at Markson Thoma and at InkWell Management. She is a graduate of Colby College and the Columbia Publishing course. Her list includes authors of fiction and non-fiction in a wide range of categories, including literary, commercial, memoir, art, food, science and history. She looks for books with deeply imagined worlds, and for writers who take risks with their work. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Jennifer Richard Jacobson
Jennifer Richard Jacobson
Jennifer, a graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the author of over a dozen award-winning children’s books including Small as an Elephant (IRA Young Adult’s Choice, Parents’ Choice Gold Award), Paper Things (ILA Social Justice Award, NTCE Charlotte Huck Honorable Mention) and The Dollar Kids illustrated by Ryan Andrews (ABA IndieNext List and Bank Street Best Book of the Year). Her newest launches are a chapter book series (Twig and Turtle: Big Move to a Tiny House) and a middle grade romance: Crashing in Love released in October 2021. She lives in Maine and when not writing, offers coaching and critiques.
Annaliese Jakimides
Annaliese Jakimides
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and mixed media artist who grew up in inner-city Boston and raised a family on 40+ acres on a dirt road in northern Maine, growing almost all the family’s food and pumping water by hand. She now lives beside a library in a small city. In addition to working with inner-city environmental justice organizations and international arts groups, she cofounded the Belfast Poetry Festival and has created/implemented arts and humanities programs in rural schools, prisons, recovery programs, and libraries, among others. Cited in national competitions, her poetry and prose have been published in many journals, anthologies, and magazines, and broadcast on Maine Public and NPR. Recent work appears in Maintenant 16: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, The Ekphrastic Review, and Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family. annaliesejakimides.com.
Zahir Janmohamed
Zahir Janmohamed
Zahir Janmohamed is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded, Racist Sandwich, was nominated for a James Beard Award.
He has received fellowships from MacDowell, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Anne Cox Chambers fellowship for long-form journalism, as well as from Tin House, the Arab American National Museum, The Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Norman Mailer Center, and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. He is a three-time alumnus of the VONA workshop for writers of color, a 2017 fiction fellow at Kundiman, a 2017 New Voices Scholar, and the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Bakeless Fiction Scholarship at Bread Loaf.
His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, The Boston Review, The Guardian, McSweeney's, Scroll India, The Economic Times and many other publications.
His media appearances include NPR, CNN, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Live Wire, The Dear Sugar Podcast, and others.
In May 2016, while living in Portland, Oregon, he co-founded Racist Sandwich, a podcast that explores the intersection between food, race, gender, and class. The podcast was nominated by Saveur magazine and by the International Association of Culinary Professionals as one of the best food shows of 2017. In 2019, it was selected as one of the best 100 podcasts by Vulture and in 2020, Esquire UK named it as one of the best podcasts.
He has also taught writing at The Attic Institute in Portland, where he was an adjunct teaching fellow, and at UC Berkeley, where he was a Student Teacher Poet under the direction of the late June Jordan.
Aside from his writing career, he has spent over a decade working in politics. From 2006 to 2009, he worked as the Advocacy Director for Amnesty International where he managed the organization’s lobbying, public outreach, and media work on the Middle East and North Africa. While there, he briefed senior officials at the White House and the State Department and authored numerous Congressional resolutions. In 2009, he testified before the US Congress about human rights abuses in the UAE. After Amnesty International, Janmohamed served as a senior foreign policy aide to Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN). During his time in Portland, he worked as the policy director for the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) where he successfully co-lobbied the Oregon State Legislature to implement K-12 ethnic studies curriculum standards, making Oregon the first state in the US to do so.
George Jreije
George Jreije
George is the Lebanese-American author of SHAD HADID AND THE ALCHEMISTS OF ALEXANDRIA, a forthcoming children's fantasy novel with HarperCollins. He has also written short stories published in collaboration with UNICEF. When not writing, George enjoys trying tasty Arabic pastries, messing with new yoga poses, and mentoring other writers.
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Dark Traffic (2021) follows The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018) and Another Bright Departure (2019). Kane has been the recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Mellon Practitioner Fellowship in Race and Ethnicity at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, multiple Individual Artist awards & Artist Fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, and residencies with the School for Advanced Research, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Millay Arts and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. She raises her children in Cambridge, and currently teaches creative nonfiction in the department of English at Harvard University, poetry in the department of English at Tufts University, and creative nonfiction and poetry in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism.
Her essays, poems, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, Before the Usual Time, Hick Poetics, Yale Review, Salamander, FLAG + VOID, Thalia, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems, 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive, Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Syncretism and Survival: A Forum on Poetics, HERE: Poems for the Planet, The Guardian, Orion, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry International, POETRY, Nat. Brut, West Branch, Territory, Drunken Boat, absent, and elsewhere.
Stuart Kestenbaum
Stuart Kestenbaum
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and the host/curator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Stuart Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and on the Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.
Lily King
Lily King
Lily King is the award-winning author of five novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, was published on March 3rd, 2020, and her first collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter, will be released on November 9, 2021. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.
Jo Knowles
Jo Knowles
Jo Knowles is the author of six novels, including Living With Jackie Chan, See You At Harry’s, Pearl, Jumping Off Swings, and Lessons from a Dead Girl. Her newest book, Read Between The Lines, was called “masterfully woven” in a starred review by Kirkus. Some of her awards include two SCBWI Crystal Kite Awards, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book, the PEN New England Children’s Book Discovery Award, an American Library Association Notable, Bank Street College’s Best Books for Children (Outstanding Merit), and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Jo has a master’s degree in children’s literature and teaches writing for young adults in the MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in Vermont with her husband and son.
Jennifer Lunden
Jennifer Lunden
Jennifer Lunden’s lyric essay, “The Butterfly Effect,” won first prize in the Creative Nonfiction animal issue (Winter 2011), went on to win a Pushcart, and later was anthologized in True Stories, Well Told… From 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. She told a version of “The Butterfly Effect” at Slant, a storytelling night organized by the Telling Room, in Portland, Maine. The essay has now been optioned for a short film.
In “Exposed: The Mammogram Myth and the Pinkwashing of America,” a piece for Orion, Lunden revealed the politics behind the corporate-driven breast cancer awareness campaign. Her essay about the health impacts of industrialism was selected for the anthology Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts. “Evidence,” a personal essay about getting lost in the woods and the vagaries of memory, was published in River Teeth and later was named a Best American Essays notable. It was later republished as “Evidence, in Track Changes” in DIAGRAM.
Lunden’s poems have been published in Sweet, Peacock Journal, Poetry Canada Review and The Café Review, and she has read them live on CBC radio. “Killing Things,” a flash fiction piece, appeared in Wigleaf and “The Fish Story” appeared in Eclectica. Her documentary Sadie’s Last Day was an official selection of the Maine International Film Festival.
She is the founder and executive director of The Center for Creative Healing, based in Portland, Maine, and was named Maine’s 2012 Social Worker of the Year. She now teaches social work as an adjunct professor in the online programs of Simmons University and the University of New England. Her essay about therapeutic writing,“Salvage, Salvation, Salve: Writing That Heals,” appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Creative Nonfiction.
The recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, Jennifer Lunden, a dual citizen, has also been awarded two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and one from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France.
Twice a Maine Literary Awards finalist, Lunden teaches writing for Iota Online, and has presented at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, the University of New England, and the Writer’s Conference at Ocean Park, among others. She and her husband, the artist Frank Turek, live in a little house in the city, where they keep six chickens, two cats, and a Great Dane named Elsie.
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado’s writing defies and blends genres such as surrealism, fantasy, and horror to create writing that is so palpable it seems alive. Her work has been compared to that of Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link and Angela Carter, but with a voice that is uniquely her own.
Growing up in a household where storytelling was always present, Carmen has been writing her whole life. She learned about stories through reading, as well as oral tradition in her family. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Her spellbinding debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was longlisted for the National Book Award before it was even published. It was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and it was the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her memoir, In the Dream House, was Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, was the #1 Indie Next Pick for November 2019, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. Of Carmen and her memoir, the New York Times writes, “Welcome to the House of Machado. Proceed directly into the forbidden room; enjoy the view as the floor gives way.”
Carmen is an immense fan of the horror genre and has a special place in her heart for Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Set in Shudder-To-Think, PA, Carmen’s newest project is a limited-run comics series called The Low, Low Woods, out from DC Comics, which takes body horror down paths heretofore unexplored in comics.
Terese Marie Mailhot
Terese Marie Mailhot
Terese Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Medium, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times, and "Best American Essays." She is the New York Times bestselling author of "Heart Berries: A Memoir." Her book was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction, and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018. Her book was also the January 2020 pick for Now Read This, a book club from PBS Newshour and The New York Times. Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper's Bazaar's Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, and she is also the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University.
Kathryn Miles
Kathryn Miles
Kathryn Miles is an award-winning journalist and science writer. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Saint Louis University and took both her Master of Arts and Doctorate in English from the University of Delaware. The long-time editor of Hawk & Handsaw, Miles served as professor of environmental studies and writing at Unity College from 2001-2015 and has since taught in several graduate schools and low residency-MFA programs including, most recently, at Green Mountain College, where she was also writer-in-residence. Miles is the author of five books: Adventures with Ari, All Standing, Superstorm, Quakeland, and Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, The Boston Globe, Down East, Ecotone, History, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Politico, Popular Mechanics, and Time. She currently serves as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council, a faculty member for several MFA programs, and as a private consultant available for emerging and established writers. She lives in Portland, Maine.
Kathryn Miles is represented by the Strothman Literary Agency. Follow her:
Scott Nash
Scott Nash
Scott Nash, author, illustrator, and instigator, illustrated the Flat Stanley books written by Jeff Brown, and designed the logos for Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Nick Jr., and Comedy Central. He wrote and illustrated The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate as well as Tuff Fluff: The Case of Duckie’s Missing Brain. Ten years ago he founded the illustration program at Maine College of Art. The program is now the largest department in the school. Nash attends many workshops and schools to teach students how to realize the value of creativity in their lives. “All too often children abandon drawing and painting because they believe they are ‘no good’ at art, as if creating only exists in the realm of those we define as artists,” says Nash. “I teach kids that creativity is open to everyone and hope to inspire them to write and draw throughout their lives.” Nash also runs NASHBOX, a graphic design and illustration company, with his wife, Nancy. Nash moved from Boston to Maine years ago to focus on making things daily, specifically to focus on his art, design, and children’s books.
Maria Padian
Maria Paian
Young adult novelist Maria Padian lives and writes from her home in midcoast Maine. Before devoting herself full-time to fiction she worked as a news reporter, congressional aide, radio essayist and freelance writer. These days, she takes breaks from the computer to text her grown children, take long walks along the beach, feed logs into the wood stove or work on her (tennis) backhand.
Lincoln Peirce
Lincoln Peirce
Lincoln Peirce (pronounced “purse”) is an American cartoonist, best known as the creator of the successful Big Nate comic strip, which has also been collected and published Big Nate comic strip collections. The strip debuted in 1991 in 135 newspapers, and currently has a client list of over 400 newspapers worldwide. Lincoln Peirce is also the author/illustrator of a series of Big Nate novels for young readers. He has also written a number of animated shorts that have appeared on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, and is the creator of the Big Nate animated series, as well as a series of Big Nate activity books.
Peirce was born on October 23, 1963 in the city of Ames, Iowa. His family moved East in 1964, and Peirce grew up in Durham, New Hampshire. He developed a fascination with comic strips at a young age and often cites Charles Schulz’s Peanuts as his greatest inspiration. At Colby College in Waterville, Maine, he studied art & art history.
After completing the Big Nate novel series in 2016, Peirce began work on Max & the Midknights, a comedic adventure story set in the Middle Ages. It is the first in a projected three-book series published by Crown Books for Young Readers. Max & the Midknights was published on January 8, 2019, and went on to spend sixteen weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, peaking at #2. The second book in the series, Max & the Midknights: Battle of the Bodkins was released on December 1, 2020.
Robert Perišić
Robert Perišić
Robert Perišić is an Croatian author, born in Split in 1969. Translations of his works were published in numerous European countries and the US. He is best known for his prose, and also writes poetry, plays and film scripts.
His novel “Naš čovjek na terenu” (“Our Man in Iraq”) won the prestigious "Jutarnji list award" in Croatia. The American edition of the novel was included in US top translation lists in 2013, along with praise from critics (The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, National Public Radio, etc.) and writers, such as Jonathan Franzen. The German edition of the novel (‘Unser Mann vor Ort’) received ‘Literaturpreis der Steiermärkischen Sparkasse 2011’ in Graz, Austria.
The novel “Područje bez signala” (“Area With No Coverage”) published in 2015 was in finalist for the “Meša Selimović” award (Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the T-portal award for best Croatian novel, and the American and French edition are currently being prepared.
Published works: poetry collection “Dvorac Amerika” (“Castle America”) of 1995, short story collections “Možeš pljunuti onoga tko bude pitao za nas” (“You may spit on the person who asks about us”) of 1999 and “Užas i veliki troškovi” (“Terror And High Costs”) of 2002, novel “Naš čovjek na terenu” of 2007, essay “Uvod u smiješni ples” (“Introduction To a Funny Dance”) of 2011, poetry collection “Jednom kasnije” (“Once, Later”) of 2012, play “Kultura u predgrađu” (“Culture In the Suburbs”) staged in Gavella, Zagreb, in 2000, film script for the feature film “100 minuta Slave” (“100 Minutes of Glory”) of 2004, and the novel “Područje bez signala” of 2015.
Robert Perisic (Robert Perišić) lives in Zagreb and works as a freelance writer.
Kate Russo
Kate Russo
Kate Russo grew up in Maine but now divides her time between there and the United Kingdom. She has an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, and exhibits in both the UK and the US.
Richard Russo
Richard Russo
Richard Russo knows small-town America. This masterful novelist has an uncanny sense of the way life works in the gritty industrial towns of the American Northeast. From the gossip and the resentments to the people and the cafes, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Richard Russo chronicles blue-collar America in ways constantly surprising and utterly revealing.
Russo is the author of eight novels, including Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of short stories; and a memoir, Elsewhere. His 2001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was also adapted into an HBO miniseries, starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt. Russo’s latest work is Chances Are…, a humorous and riveting story about the complex power of friendship.
Russo earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s in fine arts, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. In 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association and in 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in Portland, Maine.
Kate Shaffer
Kate Shaffer
Kate Shaffer is a cook book author and owns Ragged Coast Chocolates, an award-winning confectionery now located in Westbrook.
Signature Soul
Signature Soul
SIGNATURE SOUL IS A FUSION OF RHYTHM + RHYME + REASON + RESONANCE MADE UP OF AN ECLECTIC HIP HOP + SPOKEN WORD DUO
Michelle “Signature MiMi” Tarshus is a poetic being, creative expressionista and nomadic sorcerer. One half of the eclectic duo Signature Soul, MiMi and partner Marco Soulo are dedicated to raising the collective consciousness one soul at a time through the power of creative expression and the art of collaboration. Together they facilitate expression labs, concentrated writing workshops and monthly Share & Speak gatherings. They offer consulting services and facilitate dialogues and community conversations. They share original poetry and music to uplift and inspire communities and to provoke action towards a life-sustaining world full of creativity and synergy. MiMi graduated from Syracuse University where she studied Information Management and Technology, Global Enterprise Technology, and Asian/Asian American Studies, and was honored as a 2013 Remembrance Scholar as well as the recipient of the Undergraduate Service Award for her contributions to scholarship and community. As an artistic activist and recipient of an Imagining America fellowship, she continued on to pursue a Masters in Library Information Science with a focus on School Media and Collaboration. MiMi is a proud Alum of the poetry program Verbal Blend and a Co-Founder of Nu Rho Poetic Society (est. 2011). These are two groups she credits with empowering her to find her voice and share it with others. In 2014, MiMi released her first project: “Only Poetry Could Have Brought Me Here” – an EP of spoken word pieces that reflect on MiMi’s early journey. MiMi has been featured on countless stages and has opened up for incredible poets including: members of The Strivers Row, Shihan, and Saul Williams. Currently cultivating creative juices and justice in the northeast, MiMi uses her voice and gifts to empower others, especially youth. To connect – please visit www.signaturesoul.love.
Marco Soulo
AFRO-CARIBBEAN | ATLANTA RAISED
a blend of bounce, beats, & #bars
i experiment, learn, and share
my creative expressions
to uplift, inspire, and provoke action
within fellow beings
Debra Spark
Debra Spark
Debra Spark is the author of four novels, two collections of short stories, and two books of essays on fiction writing. Her most recent books are the novel Unknown Caller and the essay collection And Then Something Happened. With Deborah Joy Corey, she co-edited Breaking Bread, a book of food essays by Maine writers to raise funds for a hunger nonprofit. It is due out in May 2022. Four Way Books will publish her fifth novel in 2024.
Her short work has appeared in Agni, AWP Writers’ Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Cincinnati Review, the Chicago Tribune, Epoch, Esquire, Five Points, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, Huffington Post, Maine Magazine, Narrative, New England Travel and Life, the New England Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Yankee, and Yale Alumni Quarterly, among other places. In addition to writing book reviews, fiction, articles, and essays, she spent a decade writing about home, art, and design for Maine Home+Design, Decor Maine, Down East, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors Boston, New England Home, and Yankee. She has been the recipient of several awards including Maine’s 2017 READ ME series, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, Wisconsin Institute Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Jenny Stephens
Jenny Stephens
Jenny represents nonfiction in a variety of categories including cookbooks, practical lifestyle projects, narrative writing on environmental, social, and economic justice, natural sciences, history, food, and cultural criticism. Her clients and their recent or forthcoming books include Andrea Bemis’ Local Dirt (HarperCollins); Paco de Leon's Finance for the People (Penguin Books); GinaRae LaCerva’s Feasting Wild (Greystone Books); astronaut Nicole Stott’s Back to Earth (Seal Press); Lucy Bernholz’ How We Give Now (MIT Press); Ariel Aberg-Riger's America Redux (Balzer + Bray); Professor Desmond Patton's Facing Gakirah (University of California Press); Alicia Kennedy's Meatless (Beacon Press); John Holl's Beer + Food: A Modern Pairing Guide (Princeton Architectural Press); Professor Khiara Bridges’ Expecting Inequity (MIT Press); and Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins’ The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well (HarperOne). In addition, Jenny represents select literary estates on behalf of the agency, including the estate of National Book Award winning author Gloria Naylor. Jenny grew up on an island in Maine and studied English and film at Colby College. She joined Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. in 2012.
Shay Stewart-Bouley
Shay Stewart-Bouley
Born and raised on a combination of big city attitude and Midwestern sensibility, Chicago native Shay Stewart-Bouley, also known as Black Girl in Maine (or BGIM), had to learn a bit of Yankee ingenuity when she relocated to Maine in 2002. After a brief foray into education, she brought her socially-minded work from Chicago, where she worked with the homeless, to Maine by working with low-income and at-risk youth in southern Maine. She is currently the executive director of Community Change Inc., a nearly 50-year-old anti-racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. Shay has been blogging since 2008, frequently on matters of social justice and systemic racism, through her Black Girl In Maine website and, in 2011, she won a New England Press Association Award for her writing on race and diversity for the Portland Phoenix. Her writing also has been featured in a variety of Maine and national publications as well as several anthologies. In November 2016, she gave a TEDx talk called “Inequity, Injustice… Infection.” She is graduate of both DePaul University and Antioch University New England, and even though she works in Boston now, she is indeed still BGIM, continuing to reside in Maine.
Lynn Steger Strong
Lynn Steger Strong
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of Hold Still and, most recently, of the novel Want. She had a recurring column in The Guardian's “Two in Five” on the disappearing American middle class and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and Catapult.
Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He received his BA in Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and his MFA in fiction from Stonecoast’s low-residency program. His story collection Night of the Living Rez is forthcoming from Tin House Books (2022), and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty teaches courses in both English and Native American Studies, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.
Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize, The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named a NYT Editors’ Choice and NYT Notable Book. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, won the 2022 Story Prize and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Rebecca Traister
Rebecca Traister
Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine. A National Magazine Award winner, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies, both New York Times best-sellers, and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry.
Phuc Tran
Phuc Tran
I was born in Sài Gòn Việt Nam, my family fled to America in 1975, and I grew up in Carlisle PA. Reared on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, John Hughes, Star Wars, Bones Brigade videos, and bootlegged cassettes of Minor Threat and TSOL, I graduated high school in 1991. I majored in Classical Languages and Literature at Bard College—how did no one talk me out of that?—got my Master’s Degree at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then moved to New York City in 1997. There I apprenticed to be a tattooer while teaching Latin during the day, and I’ve been teaching and tattooing ever since. I’ve never been good at staying in one lane—ask my wife about my driving.
Following in the footsteps of E.B. White (who was neither a tattooer nor Latin teacher), my wife and I left the city and moved to Maine in 2003 (she’s an honest-to-goodness Mainer) where we opened our shop, Tsunami Tattoo.
In 2012, I delivered a TEDx talk which was highlighted by NPR’s TED Radio Hour. The TEDx talk and its reception planted a seed in me for sharing more of my story as a refugee (of which I’d shared very little). I embarked on writing my memoir in 2016, and in April 2020 SIGH, GONE was published by Flatiron Books. You can read the memoir to get all the gory details of my childhood and adolescence, but spoiler alert: I do somehow survive.
And here I am at present, deeply grateful to be following this brambly path to its unknown destination.
As Joe Strummer said, the future is unwritten.
Chris Van Dusen
Chris Van Dusen
Like many kids, Chris Van Dusen liked to draw. When he visits elementary schools, the children’s book author and illustrator says he sometimes asks the students to raise their hand if they like to draw, and all the hands go up. “The only thing that was different about me is that I kept drawing because it was the one thing I could do with some success,” Van Dusen says. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1982, he tried to make a living as a fine artist. But with a young family, it made more sense to become an illustrator. He worked for more than a decade as a freelance illustrator for magazines, specializing in art for kids, before he combined an image he had drawn of a boat stuck in a tree and story idea about a character named Mr. Magee driving down to the sea. His first book, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee, was born. The Camden resident has since written and illustrated nine other books and has illustrated fourteen books with other authors. One of his most popular books, The Circus Ship, which was published by Candlewick Press ten years ago, was just inducted into the Picture Book Hall of Fame by the American Booksellers Association. “This job can sometimes feel a little solitary working every day at home,” Van Dusen says. “But when you visit a school or a library and see a child genuinely excited about your book, with all the distractions and all the screens they have competing for their time, that’s probably the most rewarding thing of all. It’s the enthusiasm of a young reader that makes all the late nights and tight deadlines worth it.”
Karen Watterson
Karen Watterson
I once wrote an article with the opening sentence, “Bakery is my favorite word,” and I stand by it to this day, unabashedly. I’m here to wholeheartedly embrace my love of all things sugar, and to share the sweet part of life with you. While Maine’s reputation rests on lobsters and blueberries, and I do love both those foods, it’s Maine’s sweet stuff that calls to me. The state is filled with it: artisan chocolate makers, cake bakers, cookie geniuses, ice cream churners, and others abound. Their creativity never fails to delight. Some are James Beard Award- nominees, while others are just starting their sweet little businesses. I’m looking forward to exploring them all and bringing you along.
Summers spent in Maine as a child gave me an early taste of the state whetting my appetite for more, and I’ve now lived in Maine full time for close to twenty years. When we moved here, Portland was at the beginning of its rebirth as a travel and food lovers’ destination. Food blogs were just beginning to catch on, and I started my own called Mignardise, a French word for a small treat with your after-dinner coffee. It was the perfect vehicle for combining my love of food and writing. The blog eventually led to what I have always considered my dream job (so far) – Food Editor at Maine magazine. It’s still astonishing to me that there was a job that let me eat all over the state,, sampling specialties both traditional and updated.
So why start a blog about sweets now, with so many people facing serious issues in the midst of a global pandemic? These are difficult, challenging times. Dessert, always my favorite part of the meal. brings small joys into our lives, and who doesn’t need a little extra joy right now? And when we get to whatever the new “normal” is, that will still be true.
There will be no talk of calories or “I really shouldn’t”. Save that for another day, if you must mention it at all. When you’re with me, dessert is a must, no guilt. I’m embracing my love of all things sweet, and I hope you will too. As Leigh Kellis of Holy Donut says, we need to honor our cravings. We can eat salad tomorrow.
There will be occasional recipes, from Maine dessert stars and some of my own favorites. I hope you like chocolate.
Life in Maine is sweet. Embrace it.
Maya Williams
Maya Williams
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a Black Mixed Race queer nonbinary person, suicide survivor, and poet residing in Portland, Maine. They currently serve as MaineTransNet’s Sexual Assault Program Coordinator, where they develop peer support groups for trans survivors and educational material on trauma informed trans competency for advocates. They also serve as co-host of the video series Dying/Laughing, which analyzes the representation of suicide and mental health in TV and film. Maya has published poetry in glitterMOB, Occulum, The Portland Press Herald, Littoral Books, FreezeRay, and more. Ey has received residencies from organizations such as Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA) Foundation, The For Us by Us Fund’s Words of Fire Retreat, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. She is a Maine Writers and Publishers Association (MWPA) Chapbook finalist, a Best of the Net Nominee, and a winner of PortFringe’s Patron’s Choice Award for her spoken word performance “When Speaking to an Extraterrestrial.” You can see Maya as one of the three selected artists of color to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America series, hosting open mics Tuesdays for Port Veritas, and facilitating writing workshops for Quill Books & Beverage Sundays. Follow them at their website, mayawilliamspoet.com.
Julianna Wilson
Julianna Wilson
Julianna Wilson is an industry leader in audio storytelling and an award-winning Executive Producer with 15 years of experience. Collaborative team manager with track record working with worldwide celebrities and bestselling authors on 1000+ audiobooks across genres.
She created and developed a global casting platform for voiceover, Ahab Talent, which increases diversity and creative casting options for voiceover content creators. Passionate about recruiting talent and empowering teams to help creatives actualize their visions.
As the Director of Digital Production Platforms & Strategic Partnerships at Penguin Random House Audio, she produces 100 audiobooks per year while spearheading new creative and strategic partnerships. Recent production credits include working with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alicia Keys, Brandi Carlile, Priyanka Chopra, Seth Rogen, Willie Nelson, and The Tiny Chef.
She is a native New Yorker, writer, urban gardener, and rock climber and graduated from Colby College with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing.
W.S. Winslow
W.S. Winslow
W. S. Winslow was born and raised in Maine but spent her working life in Boston, New York and San Francisco. A ninth-generation Mainer, she now lives in a small town Downeast most of the year. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French from the University of Maine and an MFA from NYU. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Yemassee Journal and Bird’s Thumb. Her first novel, The Northern Reach, was published by Flatiron Books in 2021. She is currently working on a second novel and a short story collection.