New Fellows & Scholars

The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance is pleased to announce the recipients of several fall fellowships and scholarships. These fellowships and scholarships support writers at different stages of their careers and living in different parts of Maine.

For the fourth year in a row, MWPA has selected five or more Ashley Bryan Fellows in honor of the life and work of Ashley Bryan (below, top left) and to support emerging writers. Bryan was the 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. MWPA’s Samara Cole Doyon led the selection process.

The 2024 Bryan Fellows include (below, clockwise from left to right): immigrant leader and writer Mufalo Chitam, queer, non-binary, second-generation Filipinx American writer and activist Jinky (Jenesha) de Rivera, Citizen Arist and performer Brian J. Evans, poet and writer Alexis Raymond, and organizer, activist, strategist, and writer Jenna Dela Cruz Vendil. A full bio for each Ashley Bryan Fellow appears below.

In September, thanks to an ongoing partnership with the Maine Community Foundation, the MWPA awarded the Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship to Olivia Box to attend the Black Fly Writers Retreat this May, all expenses paid. Box is an ecologist and writer living in Portland and her work has been published in Backpacker Magazine, JSTOR Daily, Northern Woodlands, and other local and national publications. Her essay on compost was featured in The Counter’s Eating In series, and her essay on climate models and hope was selected as the 2021 Waterman Fund essay contest winter for emerging writers.

Thanks to a partnership with Monson Arts, three past Monson Fellows recently selected (below, left to right) poet, editor, and naturalist Samaa Abdurraqib, fiction writer Kendric Chua, and poet and retired teacher Lucia Owen to receive residencies at Monson Arts in 2025. A full bio for each writer appears below.

Thanks to the ongoing support of NYT-bestselling writer Christina Baker Kline, MWPA recently selected Mattie John Bamman (above, second from right) as this year’s Christina Baker Kline Scholar. Bamman will receive free workshops at MWPA, as well as a chance to consult with Baker Kline. His writing has appeared in publications including ZYZZYVA, The Brooklyn Rail, Nailed Magazine, Eater, Downeast Magazine, and Skin & Ink, and he gave the popular TEDx talk “Words, Not Ideas: The Secret to Writing and Finishing a Nonfiction Book.” And finally, thanks to a fund set up back in 2016 to honor the untimely passing of Elizabeth Ilgenfritz, a longtime member of the organization, writer Liz Iverson (above, at right) received an Ilgrenfritz Scholarship, a $1000 award to attend a writing conference in 2025. Iverson is an Ashley Bryan Fellow and served as a Lit Fest Fellow earlier this year, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, and Fourteen Hills.

The MWPA congratulates all of these writers on their fellowships and scholarships, as well as all of those who applied this year. Each of these opportunities will open again for submissions in the early fall of 2025. For more information on any of these opportunities, visit mainewriters.org.

2024 Ashley Bryan Fellows

Mufalo Chitam is an immigrant community leader representing 100+ members and partner organizations including immigrant constituency and advocacy groups as well as direct service and grassroots community organizations, Mufalo was recognized as Spurwink’s 2023 Humanitarian of the Year and 2022 Maine Biz Women to Watch honoree for her work as an immigrant advocacy leader at Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (MIRC).

Jinky (Jenesha) de Rivera is a queer, non-binary, second-generation Filipinx American writer and activist, and they are the co-editor of Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time (Seal Press, 2006), with additional writing featured in Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally (Seal Press, 2005). Their short plays have been staged at Bindlestiff Studio, a Filipino American performing arts theater in San Francisco, and showcased in 3GirlsTheatre Company’s New Works Festival. They earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California, and are currently working on a genre-bending, time-traveling family drama.

Mixing disciplines, mixing professions, and mixed race, Brian J. Evans unpacks the “moments of suspension” that reside in the spaces between spaces—convinced that connections exist between us all and it is the responsibility of the Arts to remind us to be holistically human, lest we forget. Evans is an assistant professor in the Theater and Dance Department and American Studies Program at Bates College in Lewiston.

Alexis Raymond is a poet who writes to honor the minority experience in predominantly white spaces. As a Black woman growing up in Maine she now aims to spread awareness and foster community by sharing stories. A Stonecoast MFA graduate, she is also a journalist and a published short-story fiction writer. Her work has been featured in Portland Monthly Magazine, The Elevation Review, So to Speak Journal, Moonstone Arts’ Fatal Force Anthology, Vaum Magazine, and Hellbender Magazine.

Jenna Dela Cruz Vendil is an award-winning organizer, activist, and engagement strategist who works to build inclusive systems through social action, policy, and electoral engagement. In 2009, Jenna became the first Asian American woman elected in Portland, serving on the School Board for nearly a decade to advance educational equity, strengthen student voice, and increase diverse community engagement. Jenna currently works for Bates College, facilitating experiential opportunities for students to step into their power, on their journey for social change. Jenna is writing to liberate memory, disrupt cultural norms, and to pay homage to the tricksters.

MWPA's Monson Fellows

Samaa Abdurraqib, PhD, lives, writes, and loves in Wabanaki Territory. She received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After spending three years teaching at Bowdoin College, Samaa transitioned into Maine’s nonprofit world in 2013 and has served several different roles in that sector. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Maine Humanities Council. She is also a contract facilitator, a coach/mentor for leaders of color, and an active board member. Samaa is the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (2023). Recently, her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, december, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and in the edited collection Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (2022). Her newest chapbook, Towards a Retreat will be published by Diode Editions in 2025. Samaa is a certified Maine Master Naturalist and she is always listening for birdsong.

 Growing up gay in a community with strong Catholic roots on the northernmost island of the Philippines, Kendric Chua spent most of his childhood in his imagination and within the fictional worlds of others, like Stephen King, to inoculate himself from an abusive household. Kendric emigrated to the United States when he was fifteen and earned his BFA in Visual Effects from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He now proudly calls Maine home and volunteers his design skills to benefit non-profit organizations. He has finished the first draft of his first novel and written several short stories, most of which are set in Maine. Kendric received an Ashley Bryan Fellow from MWPA and was named the Maine Arts Commission’s Literary Fellow for 2024.

Lucia Owen holds an A.B. from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A from Bryn Mawr College. She taught English at Gould Academy in Bethel for 31 years and also taught writing and critical thinking for adults starting college in UNH’s College of Lifelong Learning, and in 1994 she received their Distinguished Faculty Award. Her work has appeared in The Cafe Review, Rust & Moth, THINK, After Happy Hour Contest Issue 3, Please See Me, The Metaworker, The Prose Poem, The Bellevue Literary Review and The Healing Muse as well as in a number of anthologies, including A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, Writing the Land: Maine, Wait: Poems from the Pandemic, and Purr and Yowl, an anthology of cat poems.