2022 Ashley Bryan Fellows

MWPA is pleased to announce the 2022 Ashley Bryan Fellowships, named in honor of the life and work of Bryan (above, top left), author of more than fifty books and recipient of many awards including MWPA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2017. Bryan Fellows receive a five-year membership to MWPA with some free workshops each year as well as other forms of support; fellowships are awarded to emerging Maine writers who are Black, people of color, and/or members of one of the Wabanaki Nations or other Native peoples. Two current Bryan Fellows acted as the jurors this year with the help of MWPA Membership + Program Coordinator Samara Cole Doyon and have chosen five writers as this year’s Bryan Fellows.

The 2022 Bryan Fellows include (above, clockwise from left to right) Passamaquoddy citizen and writer Wendy Newell Dyer, who lives in Washington County; poet and scholar Ian-Khara Ellasante, who is an assistant professor at Bates College; writer and storyteller Michelle Kazaka, who lives in Westbrook; artist, writer, and educator Leila Nadir who lives in western Maine; and poet, educator, and activist Maya Williams, who lives in Portland. A full bio for each Ashley Bryan Fellow appears below.

2022 Ashley Bryan Fellows

Wendy Newell Dyer is a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Nation. Put into the Maine child welfare system at birth and later adopted, she searched for and found her biological parents when she was twenty-five and began her journey to come to know herself as a Passamaquoddy woman. In the past thirty-three years she has fully immersed herself in cultural teachings, practices and ceremonies. She graduated from the University of Maine at Machias in 2003. She was a freelance writer/photographer for the Downeast Coastal Press and the Machias Valley News Observer where she covered a variety of topics including the Maine High School Basketball Tournaments. Widowed at forty-two, Wendy helped write educational materials for the Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer, and won a national writing contest sponsored by the Prostate Cancer Foundation and judged by actress Kristin Bell. Her story "A Warrior's Homecoming" appeared in "Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writers from New England in 2014." Several of her stories have been published in the online literary magazine Dawnland Voices 2.0, two Chicken Soup for the Soul books and in Homeschooling Today magazine. As an adoptee, Wendy testified before the Maine Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. She recently shared her adoption story on WERU's Dawnland Signals. Newell Dyer was one of the recent winners of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Call for Native Writers. She works for Wayfinder Schools as the Passages teacher for Washington County. She has three sons, four grandsons and a black lab Jack.

Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara has published poems in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, The Volta, Hinchas de Poesía, Nat. Brut, and Writing the Land, and has been honored with the New Millennium Award for Poetry. Their critical writing has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and elsewhere. Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they are an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College.

Michelle Kazaka was born in the capital of the Republic Democratic of Congo. Her passion for storytelling already existed when she was 5 years old, gathering her siblings and the rest of her family around the big mango tree in their backyard almost every night. At the age of sixteen, the injustice and inequality that she endured changed everything, and she devoted herself to activism. The xenophobia she endured while passing through various African countries made her life sour and difficult until, thanks to the American immigration lottery known as "Diversity Visa Program," she was allowed to travel to the United States in search of peace and safety. She is a a mother of 3, a new Mainer for the last 5 years and, in her spare time, a storyteller/writer. She graduated from the university in Kinshasa with a degree in journalism. She writes, “Coming here, I found so many other people who shared similar experiences with me, making me feel heard and that I belonged for the first time in my life. This is why I wrote my book, ‘How Long The Night’, to provide a voice, a perspective from all immigrants who found themselves in Maine after a long journey that lasted almost their entire lives.”

Leila Christine Nadir is an award-winning Afghan-American artist, writer, and educator exploring life after ruins and the possibilities for collective memory and repair amidst ecological disruptions, childhood violence, immigration and exile, and colonial traumas. Her writing has appeared in literary, scholarly, and popular venues, including Black Warrior Review, North American Review, Asian American Literary Review, ASAP, Aster(ix), and Hyperallergic, and has been anthologized in 2021's New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims, edited by Kazim Ali. With poet Zohra Saed, she has co-edited a special collection of Afghan-American writing for the Asian American Literary Review. Her book project, Afghan Americana: An Intimate-Geopolitical Memoir, is supported in 2022-2023 by a MacDowell Fellowship, Hedgebrook Residency, and Aspen Institute Emerging Writer Fellowship. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University.

Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently the seventh poet laureate of Portland, ME from July 2021 to July 2024. Ey has published poems in venues such as The Portland Press Herald, The Cortland Review, FreezeRay, Indianapolis Review, Occulum, glitterMOB, Littoral Books, Black Table Arts, and more. Their debut poetry collection Judas & Suicide will be published May 2023, and their second collection Refused a Second Date will be published October 2023. She 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, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and The Watering Hole. Maya was one of three artists of color selected to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America series in 2020, and was listed as one of The Advocate’s Champions of Pride in 2022. Maya also serves as MaineTransNet's Community Care Program Coordinator, where they develop peer support groups for trans survivors, develop educational material on trauma informed trans competency for advocates, provide outreach to incarcerated trans folks, and develop arts programming. Follow more of eir work, and invite em to read or facilitate a workshop, at mayawilliamspoet.com.