LENOX, Mass. — The Mount and Western Massachusetts' Straw Dog Writers Guild announced the nine writers selected for the 2023 Residency for Emerging Writers. 

 

Among this years' writers are a dancer-turned-oncologist, a public defender, and a prison abolitionist.

 

The selected writers will be working on developing their respective works at The Mount for one week each, between March 5 and March 25.

 

Submissions were reviewed anonymously and ranked based on quality of writing, originality of voice, and the potential for growth as a writer.

 

The nine 2023 Writers-in-Residence are:

 

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 is from Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Nurture, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry & Art, Kitchn, and Serious Eats. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is at work on her first novel set during the war in Vietnam, which explores the secrets that can make and unmake a family as they navigate the devastations of war. At the center is a family with shadowy ties to the National Police and the CIA.

 

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.

 

This is the ninth year The Mount has offered writers an opportunity to create at The Mount and its second year partnering with Straw Dog Writers Guild. The revamped residency now focuses on writers who are developing their craft. There is no prerequisite for being published. Applications open in September each year on edithwharton.org.