Publishing a book is breakthrough moment in a writer’s career, a transformational step that suddenly makes available a whole host of opportunities, including readings, speaking engagements, teaching and more. But it is very difficult to complete a book-length project without support. It is a long-term process that requires encouragement, feedback, mentorship, and resources. That is why Literary Cleveland created the Breakthrough Writing Residency.
Literary Cleveland’s Breakthrough Writing Residency provides free yearlong mentorship, support, and opportunities to help six emerging writers in Greater Cleveland develop a book-length project.
Residents (two in each genre of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) will work with a mentor to make progress on a manuscript, gain free access to Literary Cleveland programs, take part in professional development opportunities, and present their work at the annual Inkubator Conference. The program is primarily virtual with monthly in-person meetings throughout the year. Thanks to a generous funder, residents will also receive a monthly stipend of to support their work.
The Breakthrough Writing Residency is intended for those who demonstrate a passion for writing and a commitment to developing a book-length manuscript but who have not published a book or attended an MFA program.
Applicants are selected for the program based on the excellence of their writing and ability to complete their proposed writing project. Writing projects may include (but are not limited to) completing the first draft of a novel, memoir, poetry manuscript, or similar creative work, or revising and submitting a book-length project for publication. The residency is for personal writing projects (manuscripts) only, not community writing programs.
The residency specifically aims to assist emerging writers who have not published a book and have not completed an MFA program.
We are especially interested in reaching writers with low or limited income for whom expensive writing opportunities are out of reach. Additionally, we encourage writers who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander, or multihyphenate, those who identify as LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and other members of communities historically underrepresented by and in the literary community to apply.
Applicants must meet all of the following criteria:
Do not reject yourself! Don’t stop yourself from applying because you don’t want to take the opportunity away from someone else who needs it more. Apply and let us sort that part out! If you have any questions, email info@litcleveland.org.
The application includes:
Literary Cleveland staff and board are not involved in application review or selection. Applications are reviewed by an independent panel of writers from out of town so they will not know the applicants. The panel will select finalists based on the following criteria:
Mentors will then select participants from the list of finalists.
2026-2027 mentors include Joseph Earl Thomas (fiction), Ira Sukrungruang (nonfiction), and Brittany Rogers (poetry). Application are open through Sunday, July 12 at 11pm ET. The residency will begin November 2026 and run through October 2027.
Applications for 2026-2027 are now closed. Stay tuned for the 2027-2028 applications which will open in May 2027.
Questions? Email info@litcleveland.org
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We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2026-2027. Literary Cleveland received 177 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Amira Alamin and Kadeem Thomas working (with mentor Joseph Earl Thomas on fiction), Raja Belle Freeman and Jen Hallaman (working with mentor Brittany Rogers on poetry), and Lisa Chu and Shannon Brennen Ramdhan (working with mentor Ira Sukrungruang on nonfiction).
Congrats as well to our residency finalists this year: Karim Ragab, Miranda Sepulveda, and Kei Yanamayu for fiction; River Baird, Jacqueline Owen, and Ericka Mathews for nonfiction; and Noah Christopher, Lucy McNees, and Christy Rogers for poetry.
Amira Alamin (Fiction) is a writer and playwrightfrom Solon, Ohio. She began her creative journey at George WashingtonUniversity where she won the Julian Clement Chase Creative Writing inWashington Award for her piece "Whatever's Next." Since her time atGeorge Washington University, Alamin has been a Youth Playwright in Progresssince 2023 with Youth Playwright Theatre in Washington D.C., and was chosen toworkshop her play Dresses That Twirl through the Kennedy Center's REACH programin 2024. While writing her novel, Alamin participated in numerous CCPLworkshops before attending the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, UnitedKingdom. There, she received her Masters of Letters in Creative Writing withDistinction. Amira has found that her passion for writing stems from the desireto produce authentic works that portray queer people as dynamic andmultifaceted. She refuses to create queer art that romanticizes, or evennormalizes suffering, as she's found this stereotype to be harmful to the queercommunity. In contrast, pain in her pieces is just as present as joy, loveflows just as easily as hurt, and all work together to create characters andstories that are holistic and true.
Lisa Chiu (Nonfiction) is a Taiwanese Americanstoryteller and food fanatic. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’sInternet Tendency, Ideastream Public Media, People Magazine,Ohio Magazine, the Mercury News, the Plain Dealer andother media outlets. Her essays appear in anthologies including Labor ofLove: A Literary Mama Anthology, Neighborhood Voices, Cheers toMuses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women and Who’s Your Mama?:The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers. An award-winning humorist, Lisa washonored in the 2026 Erma Bombeck Writing Competition. She co-wrote a TV sitcompilot that earned semifinalist recognition in the 2019 WeScreenplay DiverseVoices screenwriting contest. Lisa has a B.A. in English from Case WesternReserve University and an M.A. in journalism from The Ohio State University.She writes about family, food, culture and community and is working on amemoir, Hungry Ghost.
Raja Belle Freeman (Poetry) is a performance poet andvisual artist. She has worked as a teaching artist for Lake Erie Ink and TwelveLiterary Arts, and as a member of the board of South Euclid's communitydevelopment corporation One South Euclid. She also completed a visual artsresidency with Akron Soul Train in 2023. She has been mentioned in several newsarticles and featured on WKYC. She has done readings all over the city forprominent organizations including The Western Reserve Historical Society,Literary Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art and many others. She graduatedfrom Cleveland State University where she received a bachelor's degree inCreative Writing with a minor in Black Studies. Some of her readings can befound on YouTube.
Jen Hallaman (Poetry) is a bookseller and writerliving in Northeast Ohio with her husband, daughter, and two very large cats.Her creative work appears in the New Orleans Review, Pithead Chapel,DIAGRAM, SWING, Orange Blossom Review, and Appalachian Review, amongother publications. In her free time, she takes pictures of the sky and bakesstrawberry basil pie.
Shannon Brennen Ramdhan (Nonfiction) is a memoiristand fiction writer living in the Lake Erie-abutting suburbs of Cleveland. Shewas raised in Hicksville, Ohio, a small town near the Indiana state line thatshe will tell you—but only if you ask nicely—is exactly what it sounds like:rural, quiet, and planted over with soybeans and corn. She earned her BA inFiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago and then let her wanderlust carryher west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. After two decades cosplaying as anurbanite, she returned to Ohio, where she thinks she'll stay because she likesthe birds here. Much of her work is rooted in the rural Midwest. Her writingoften occupies the unsettled space between leaving and returning, estrangementand belonging, and the tender pull of home. She is a Pushcart Prizenominee and a member of Literary Cleveland. Her work has appeared in TheGreat Lakes Review, Gordon Square Review (forthcoming), Little Fruits Magazine,Pile Press, The Lemonwood Quarterly, The South Loop Review, and elsewhere.
Kadeem Thomas (Fiction) is originally from Tampa,Florida, and has lived in Cleveland for nearly two years. He is of Cuban,Trinidadian, and Jamaican descent and speaks several languages, includingEnglish, Spanish, and French. He enjoys writing, hiking, running, and skateboarding,though he spends much of his time studying history and linguistics. As anundergraduate, Kadeem focused on international studies and linguistics. Afterserving in the Peace Corps, he returned to school and earned a Master ofBusiness Administration in International Business and a Master of Science inSupply Chain Management. During college, he served as president of the RhapsodyPoetry Club and ran a YouTube channel called Getting to Know, where he traveledto different countries and interviewed local people to help viewers gain abroader understanding of the world. If given more time and resources, he hopesto revive the project in the future.
2026-2027 Mentors
Fiction: Joseph Earl Thomas
Nonfiction: Ira Sukrungruang
Poetry: Brittany Rogers
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We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2025-2026. Literary Cleveland received 208 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Tristan Summers, Jamie Stewart Crawford for fiction, Stafford Hartman and Eris Eady for nonfiction; Michelle Wallace and Taylor Patterson for poetry.
Congrats as well to our residency finalists this year: Adriana Nelson, Karim Ragab, and Jamie Watson for fiction, Shannise Jackson-Ndiaye, Jacqueline Owen, and Emily Waples for nonfiction, and Sylvia Clark, Raja Belle Freeman, and Jen Hallaman for poetry.
Jamie Stewart Crawford (Fiction) (she/they) is a writer and nonprofit administrator. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals such as Suburban Witchcraft, Lit Nerds, The Blunt Space, and AC|DC Journal. Her work has also been featured in the anthologies Unapologetic Love: A Queer Charity Anthology of Radical Resilience and Driftwood and Dreams: Stories Set Along the Great Lakes. Jamie’s short screenplay War Torn, a queer drama, has been a finalist in competitions at the Cindependent Film Festival, the Boston Screenplay Awards, the Nashville Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, and the Caledonia Short Script Competition. Jamie enjoys community building, improv comedy, and 70s rock n' roll.
Eris Eady (Nonfiction) (They/She) is a Black, Bisexual, Non-binary & Disabled minister, consultant, advocate, author, artist and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. They have organized, facilitated, performed, presented, and curated healing spaces all over the country. Eris has worked in the nonprofit and advocacy sector for 25 years. Known as the “Come Out Coach,” Eris equips individuals and organizations with the tools needed to foster identity and cultivate equitably inclusive practices while integrating their role as a Movement Chaplain to ensure emotionally and spiritually safe environments. They have a Master’s of Science in Positive Organizational Development & Change from Case Western Reserve University. Eris is currently a student at Memphis Theological Seminary obtaining a Doctorate of Ministry in Womanist Preaching. They are the proud parent of Yahsiin Zora Venia.
Stafford Hartman (Nonfiction) is a musician, educator, and emerging writer based in Cleveland, OH. A Kentucky native, she spent a decade singing professionally before transitioning to music education. In 2021, she began exploring micro-memoir through @americangirltherapy, an Instagram project chronicling childhood memories tied to her American Girl doll collection. These posts evolved into longer-form writing that explores her experiences as a millennial coming of age in the Bible Belt. She is currently developing a full-length memoir which uses music as a central framework for exploring her lived experiences with class, identity, and recovery. In addition to writing and teaching, Stafford is passionate about creating affirming, accessible spaces for young musicians and encouraging other suburban mothers to fly their freak flags without apology.
Taylor Patterson (Poetry) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer from Northeast Ohio. A graduate of Kent State University in journalism and creative writing, she has taught poetry in settings ranging from public schools to juvenile detention centers. Patterson’s work confronts girlhood, addiction, class, and the breaking and remaking of home. Her current project is a chapbook of poetry and lyrical prose that renders survival, femininity, and the complicated holiness of Midwestern women.
Tristan Summers (Fiction) has lived in four different countries and worked as everything from an English teacher at a rural Chinese school, to a physical therapist assistant teaching stroke patients to walk, to wilderness search and rescue operations in the Blue Ridge mountains. He is a multiple-time finalist of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction contest, as well as the Cuyahoga Community College Emerging Writer Scholarship. He writes in several different genres, but his work is consistently strange, sad, and beautiful.
Michelle Tackla Wallace (Poetry) is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. A daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she often finds herself negotiating different cultures and values, a struggle that informs her poetry. Her work has been published in Rise Up Review, which nominated her poem “An Orphan Argues With the Dead” for a Pushcart Prize; Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves, an anthology of Asian-American poets; Babel, a journal of the International Cities of Refuge Network; and it is slated for inclusion in Poets for Peace: Sunflowers Rising Anthology. She and her mother, Yvette Tackla, co-translated a poem entitled “After One Year of This War” from Arabic into English to be published this fall in the Manhattan Review. Michelle has an MA in English from John Carroll University and works in the healthcare field.
Fiction: Alison Stine
Nonfiction: Zoë Bossiere
Poetry: Philip Metres
We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2024-2025. Literary Cleveland received 111 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Molly Gabriel, Dante DelBene, and Maia White for fiction, Isabella Moreno and Ted Samuel for nonfiction, and Story Rhinehart and Chelsea Daniel for poetry.
Finalists for the residency include Nakiyah Fears, Karim Ragab, and April Simms for fiction; Gina Cortese, Jen Ditlevson Haglund, and Shannise Jackson-Ndiayefor nonfiction; and Sylvia Clark, Jen Hallaman, and Melissa Vincel for poetry.
Chelsea Daniel (Poetry) is an emerging poet born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. As a Black, queer, and disabled woman, Daniel’s work grounds itself in the mundane and extraordinary experiences of Black and LGBTQIA+ American life. In positions at Cleveland Rape Crisis Center and OAESV, Daniel led trauma-informed creative writing workshops for survivors interested in telling their stories through writing. A graduate of Cleveland State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Creative Writing, Daniel was selected in 2015 as a non-fiction fellow for Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA)and mentored by StaceyannChin and Junot Díaz. Working across poetic genres of drama, romance, and magical realism, Daniel is currently developing her first feature-length poetry manuscript.
Dante DelBene (Fiction) is a writer and cinematographer fromYoungstown, Ohio. His professional writing experience includes ad copy and commercial scripts for regional and national brands, as well as a byline in Hypefresh,a news and pop-culture magazine out of Philadelphia. His short fiction has been published in SLAB, Olney Magazine, HASH Journal, RedCoyote, Volney Road Review, and Stoneboat. His career in the production industry inspired a novel about a filmmaker who stumbles upon a humanitarian tragedy that pulls the curtain on content creation.
Molly Gabriel (Fiction) is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, and as the Flash Fiction Editor’s Pick in Barren Magazine. Her story,“XO Training,” was anthologized in the Best Small Fictions of 2020. She was the 2007 recipient of the Robert Fox Award for Young Writers. She read inthe Jax by Jax Literary Festival in 2019. Currently, Molly lives in northeast Ohio with her husband and son where she is working on her first novel.
Isabella Moreno (Nonfiction) is a Nuyorican proudly hailing from the Bronx; writing, gardening and blossoming in Cleveland, Ohio. Her personal writing explores, and gives testament to, memories, recollections and anecdotes influenced by her multi-generational (multi-hyphenated) familial experiences with an ever-changing historical background. She has 30 years of experience in education from K-12 classrooms to non-profit and college administration. For 15+ years she has created workshops for creatives of color. She is the founder of Illuminating Our Voices. She believes joy can always be found in collective spaces of shared creation. Her two adult children add the magical rhythm to her heart.
Story Rhinehart (Poetry) is a writer, choreographer and artist. Her poem “The Day I Met St. Michael Sitting on the Steps of theCuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio” won the 2024 Robinson Jeffer’s TOR House Poetry Prize. Story has been published in The Caribbean Writer.This summer she collaborated with the poet Raja Belle Freeman on the GreekChorus for Batrachomyomachia: The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice: A Tiny Homeric Epic, which was presented by ARTFUL and Art Acts at the Brownhoist Ballroom. Story is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Hathaway Brown School.
Ted Samuel (Nonfiction) is an educator and nonprofit director who centers storytelling in almost every aspect of his work. He earned a B.A. inInternational Studies from Kenyon College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University. His career has spanned three continents where he has conducted ethnographic research, supported local social movements, and facilitated intercultural education. The youngest of five children, Ted grew up in an Indian American immigrant family that settled in northern Appalachia. He’s currently working on a collection of personal essays that explore how material culture—inanimate objects from broken clocks to globs of spit—has steered his navigation of race, heritage, sexuality, faith, and privilege in places that feel both perpetually foreign and intimately familiar.
Maia White (Fiction) is a retired nurse and social worker living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. After working for 24 years as a therapist, she returned to school for a degree in nursing, where she worked for another 17 years in roles that incorporated her social work background with nursing care. Working most of her career with people living in poverty, her work values are centered on providing care that is respectful and empowering. She has loved both reading and writing since she can remember and is working on her first novel.
Fiction: Claire McMillan
Mahoning County - Fiction: DM Pulley
Nonfiction: Athena Dixon
Poetry: Teri Ellen Cross Davis
We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2023-2024. Literary Cleveland received 113 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Patricia Brubaker and Maureen McGuirk for fiction, Libby Chaney and Elizabeth O'Donnellfor nonfiction, and Kristin Gustafson and Jenna Martínez for poetry.
Finalists for the residency include Catherine Fields, Julieanne Lopresto, and Christopher Richards for fiction; Kevin Bain, Meghan Cliffel, and Kristi Majni for nonfiction; and El Bentivegna, Sylvia Clark, and Rosary Kennedy for poetry.
Patricia Brubaker has been writing in some form most of her life. She grew up in a single parent household and worked to save enough money to attend Cleveland State University and receive degrees in English Literature. While getting her degrees, she became the mother of three children but continued to find ways to write. Over twenty years ago she received an Ohio Arts Council Grant, published stories in literary journals, and seemed on her way to a writing career, but life got in her way when she became the guardian of her brother's three children in addition to her own. She began teaching English, earned a counseling degree, and worked as both a school counselor and mental health counselor for the next twenty-some years. Retiring in 2019 has allowed her to return her focus to her first love, writing. She is currently working on a novel about three high school friends, now in their sixties, whose lives are altered when they learn that the bodies of two of their friends who disappeared in 1970 have been found.
Maureen McGuirk earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in writing for film and television from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her short story “Miss Fortunate” was published in quiet Shorts, a Seattle-based arts journal. Her one-act play “A Private Conversation” earned an honorable mention in the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2016, and was published in Two Sisters Writing & Publishing Second Annual Anthology in 2019. In December 2021, her short story “Rule 49” was included in B-Cubed Press’s anthology Alternative Deathiness. Recently, her short story "Last of My Kind" was accepted into Ohio Writers Association's anthology House of Secrets due out this fall. She is at work on a novel about Jason and Morgan, a newly engaged couple in a world where married couples share not only their lives but a single body.
Libby Chaney has always been an artist and writer. She was born, raised and educated in Ohio, but she wandered off to California in her 20’s. There she inadvertently stayed for 47 years. She taught, traveled a bit, married and had 2 children. After her son suddenly died, she was drawn back to her Ohio and the edge of Lake Erie — Cleveland, exactly — where she lives in a studio made from a converted mid-century medical center. She changed its large parking lot into a huge garden. During COVID Libby had a surprise triple bypass heart surgery and might not have survived without the care and love of her third and final husband, Paul Waszink. Neither would the garden. She is at work on a memoir in stories about everything from her high school days when girls were not allowed to take Mechanical Drawing to the 60's in Los Angeles to the loss of her son.
Elizabeth O'Donnell was born and raised in England and is a triplet, one of seven children of a single mother. She left the United Kingdom at age eighteen and emigrated to Canada as a nanny, a job she held for three years while studying part-time to earn acceptance into the University of Toronto, from which she graduated with a degree in physical therapy. Liz later moved to the United States with her partner and raised two sons, attended graduate school where she earned her MSE and PhD in Counseling and currently works full-time as a clinical psychotherapist. Liz is raising yellow- lab, Delta, for Guiding eyes for the Blind until she is sixteen months old when Delta will return to GEB's Canine Development Center to complete her formal seeing-eye dog training. She is at work on a memoir about growing up poor in England in the late 50's and 60's as one of seven children of a single bi-racial mother.
Kristin Gustafson is a poet and editor from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Otterbein University in 2019, and her poetry has been published in over a dozen literary magazines. She currently lives in Cuyahoga Falls with her partner and small dog. Her work infuses her love of internet culture with her struggles with mental illness.
Jenna Martinez is a queer, Mexican-American femme originally from San Antonio, Texas living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in Homology Lit and Femme, Collectively Zine 0.1. Her poem, “Elemental”, was the third place winner of the 2023 One Page Poetry contest. Jenna is a recipient of the Support for Artists grant from the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center funded by Cuyahoga Arts. Her art is influenced by curanderismo, the cosmos, and community. She is at work on a collection of poems exploring how the places she has lived alchemize her intersecting identities including her queerness, Mexican heritage, Texas roots, and Midwestern home.
Fiction: Mary Grimm
Nonfiction: Raechel Anne Jolie
Poetry: Danny Caine
We are pleased to announce the inaugural Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2022-2023. Literary Cleveland received 113 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Sonia Feldman and Andrea Imdacha for fiction, Silk Allen and Michael Loderstedt for nonfiction, and Ricardo Brown and Corey Miller for poetry.
Finalists for the residency include Tiffany Graham Charkosky, Bernard Harris, and Jessie Motts for fiction; Arykah Carter, Michelle Droll, and Cindy Illig for nonfiction; and Kristin Gustafson, Terre Maher, and Tierra Tramble for poetry.
Sonia Feldman is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in journals like The Missouri Review, The Southern Review and Beloit Poetry Journal. She runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, an email newsletter sharing one good poem a week plus commentary. She is at work on a literary coming-of-age novel that explores ways of loving—amicable, familial, romantic and sexual—their profound commonalities and powerful, intangible differences.
Andrea Imdacha is a writer and poet of Sri Lankan and Hungarian heritage who hails from Savannah, GA. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Literary Mama and Mash Stories. Her short story “Mohini Baba” was a finalist for North American Review’s 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Prize in Speculative Literature and is forthcoming in their Fall 2022 edition. Her novel manuscript, Tiberius, was a semi-finalist for the James Kirkwood Prize in Fiction. Andrea lives in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and son. She is currently working on a speculative novel that weaves together elements of global folklore, fairy tales, and gothic tropes, filtering them through a modern lens.
Silk Allen is a storyteller and personal stylist from Cleveland, Ohio whose influences range from fashion, history and music to the words of Iceberg Slim and Lil Kim. Silk received a degree in journalism from Central State University and an associate’s in fashion merchandising from Virginia Marti College, and she has written for local publications like BFly Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Plain Press, and currently The Destination Cleveland Visitor’s Guide. Silk was accepted into the Twelve Literary Arts Baldwin House Urban Writing Residency in 2021 and has attended many Lit Cleveland events over the years, using the workshops to help hone her writing skills. She’s currently working on a collection of essays titled “I Write How I Talk Vol. 1” about coming of age in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Michael Loderstedt is Professor Emeritus of Kent State University where he taught printmaking and photography. He continues to explore new studio and writing projects that investigate the geography, histories, or the natural phenomena of place. His recent manuscript entitled The Yellowhammer’s Cross received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature, and his recent work has been published in Neighborhood Voices, Muleskinner Journal, and the NC Literary Review (receiving the 2021 James Applewhite Prize for Poetry) and was featured in the CAN Triennial. He is currently working on a memoir of his time living on the Outer Banks of NC.
Rico Brown is an artist and writer living in NE Ohio. He started writing poetry as part of trauma therapy, and it has since become a passion. Rico is currently working on a collection of poems about his life as a queer man of color, trauma survivor, and recovered drug addict living with depression.
Corey Miller’s writing has appeared in Booth, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He reads for TriQuarterly, Longleaf Review, and Barren Magazine. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he likes to take the dogs for adventures. Corey is currently working on a manuscript of environmental poems that pair with photographs.
Fiction: Laura Maylene Walter
Nonfiction: Eliese Colette Goldbach
Poetry: Kelly Harris-DeBerry
Publishing a book is breakthrough moment in a writer’s career, a transformational step that suddenly makes available a whole host of opportunities, including readings, speaking engagements, teaching and more. But it is very difficult to complete a book-length project without support. It is a long-term process that requires encouragement, feedback, mentorship, and resources. That is why Literary Cleveland created the Breakthrough Writing Residency.
Literary Cleveland’s Breakthrough Writing Residency provides free yearlong mentorship, support, and opportunities to help six emerging writers in Greater Cleveland develop a book-length project.
Residents (two in each genre of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) will work with a mentor to make progress on a manuscript, gain free access to Literary Cleveland programs, take part in professional development opportunities, and present their work at the annual Inkubator Conference. The program is primarily virtual with monthly in-person meetings throughout the year. Thanks to a generous funder, residents will also receive a monthly stipend of to support their work.
The Breakthrough Writing Residency is intended for those who demonstrate a passion for writing and a commitment to developing a book-length manuscript but who have not published a book or attended an MFA program.
Applicants are selected for the program based on the excellence of their writing and ability to complete their proposed writing project. Writing projects may include (but are not limited to) completing the first draft of a novel, memoir, poetry manuscript, or similar creative work, or revising and submitting a book-length project for publication. The residency is for personal writing projects (manuscripts) only, not community writing programs.
The residency specifically aims to assist emerging writers who have not published a book and have not completed an MFA program.
We are especially interested in reaching writers with low or limited income for whom expensive writing opportunities are out of reach. Additionally, we encourage writers who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander, or multihyphenate, those who identify as LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and other members of communities historically underrepresented by and in the literary community to apply.
Applicants must meet all of the following criteria:
Do not reject yourself! Don’t stop yourself from applying because you don’t want to take the opportunity away from someone else who needs it more. Apply and let us sort that part out! If you have any questions, email info@litcleveland.org.
The application includes:
Literary Cleveland staff and board are not involved in application review or selection. Applications are reviewed by an independent panel of writers from out of town so they will not know the applicants. The panel will select finalists based on the following criteria:
Mentors will then select participants from the list of finalists.
2026-2027 mentors include Joseph Earl Thomas (fiction), Ira Sukrungruang (nonfiction), and Brittany Rogers (poetry). Application are open through Sunday, July 12 at 11pm ET. The residency will begin November 2026 and run through October 2027.
Applications for 2026-2027 are now closed. Stay tuned for the 2027-2028 applications which will open in May 2027.
Questions? Email info@litcleveland.org
We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2026-2027. Literary Cleveland received 177 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Amira Alamin and Kadeem Thomas working (with mentor Joseph Earl Thomas on fiction), Raja Belle Freeman and Jen Hallaman (working with mentor Brittany Rogers on poetry), and Lisa Chu and Shannon Brennen Ramdhan (working with mentor Ira Sukrungruang on nonfiction).
Congrats as well to our residency finalists this year: Karim Ragab, Miranda Sepulveda, and Kei Yanamayu for fiction; River Baird, Jacqueline Owen, and Ericka Mathews for nonfiction; and Noah Christopher, Lucy McNees, and Christy Rogers for poetry.
Amira Alamin (Fiction) is a writer and playwrightfrom Solon, Ohio. She began her creative journey at George WashingtonUniversity where she won the Julian Clement Chase Creative Writing inWashington Award for her piece "Whatever's Next." Since her time atGeorge Washington University, Alamin has been a Youth Playwright in Progresssince 2023 with Youth Playwright Theatre in Washington D.C., and was chosen toworkshop her play Dresses That Twirl through the Kennedy Center's REACH programin 2024. While writing her novel, Alamin participated in numerous CCPLworkshops before attending the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, UnitedKingdom. There, she received her Masters of Letters in Creative Writing withDistinction. Amira has found that her passion for writing stems from the desireto produce authentic works that portray queer people as dynamic andmultifaceted. She refuses to create queer art that romanticizes, or evennormalizes suffering, as she's found this stereotype to be harmful to the queercommunity. In contrast, pain in her pieces is just as present as joy, loveflows just as easily as hurt, and all work together to create characters andstories that are holistic and true.
Lisa Chiu (Nonfiction) is a Taiwanese Americanstoryteller and food fanatic. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’sInternet Tendency, Ideastream Public Media, People Magazine,Ohio Magazine, the Mercury News, the Plain Dealer andother media outlets. Her essays appear in anthologies including Labor ofLove: A Literary Mama Anthology, Neighborhood Voices, Cheers toMuses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women and Who’s Your Mama?:The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers. An award-winning humorist, Lisa washonored in the 2026 Erma Bombeck Writing Competition. She co-wrote a TV sitcompilot that earned semifinalist recognition in the 2019 WeScreenplay DiverseVoices screenwriting contest. Lisa has a B.A. in English from Case WesternReserve University and an M.A. in journalism from The Ohio State University.She writes about family, food, culture and community and is working on amemoir, Hungry Ghost.
Raja Belle Freeman (Poetry) is a performance poet andvisual artist. She has worked as a teaching artist for Lake Erie Ink and TwelveLiterary Arts, and as a member of the board of South Euclid's communitydevelopment corporation One South Euclid. She also completed a visual artsresidency with Akron Soul Train in 2023. She has been mentioned in several newsarticles and featured on WKYC. She has done readings all over the city forprominent organizations including The Western Reserve Historical Society,Literary Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art and many others. She graduatedfrom Cleveland State University where she received a bachelor's degree inCreative Writing with a minor in Black Studies. Some of her readings can befound on YouTube.
Jen Hallaman (Poetry) is a bookseller and writerliving in Northeast Ohio with her husband, daughter, and two very large cats.Her creative work appears in the New Orleans Review, Pithead Chapel,DIAGRAM, SWING, Orange Blossom Review, and Appalachian Review, amongother publications. In her free time, she takes pictures of the sky and bakesstrawberry basil pie.
Shannon Brennen Ramdhan (Nonfiction) is a memoiristand fiction writer living in the Lake Erie-abutting suburbs of Cleveland. Shewas raised in Hicksville, Ohio, a small town near the Indiana state line thatshe will tell you—but only if you ask nicely—is exactly what it sounds like:rural, quiet, and planted over with soybeans and corn. She earned her BA inFiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago and then let her wanderlust carryher west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. After two decades cosplaying as anurbanite, she returned to Ohio, where she thinks she'll stay because she likesthe birds here. Much of her work is rooted in the rural Midwest. Her writingoften occupies the unsettled space between leaving and returning, estrangementand belonging, and the tender pull of home. She is a Pushcart Prizenominee and a member of Literary Cleveland. Her work has appeared in TheGreat Lakes Review, Gordon Square Review (forthcoming), Little Fruits Magazine,Pile Press, The Lemonwood Quarterly, The South Loop Review, and elsewhere.
Kadeem Thomas (Fiction) is originally from Tampa,Florida, and has lived in Cleveland for nearly two years. He is of Cuban,Trinidadian, and Jamaican descent and speaks several languages, includingEnglish, Spanish, and French. He enjoys writing, hiking, running, and skateboarding,though he spends much of his time studying history and linguistics. As anundergraduate, Kadeem focused on international studies and linguistics. Afterserving in the Peace Corps, he returned to school and earned a Master ofBusiness Administration in International Business and a Master of Science inSupply Chain Management. During college, he served as president of the RhapsodyPoetry Club and ran a YouTube channel called Getting to Know, where he traveledto different countries and interviewed local people to help viewers gain abroader understanding of the world. If given more time and resources, he hopesto revive the project in the future.
2026-2027 Mentors
Fiction: Joseph Earl Thomas
Nonfiction: Ira Sukrungruang
Poetry: Brittany Rogers
We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2025-2026. Literary Cleveland received 208 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Tristan Summers, Jamie Stewart Crawford for fiction, Stafford Hartman and Eris Eady for nonfiction; Michelle Wallace and Taylor Patterson for poetry.
Congrats as well to our residency finalists this year: Adriana Nelson, Karim Ragab, and Jamie Watson for fiction, Shannise Jackson-Ndiaye, Jacqueline Owen, and Emily Waples for nonfiction, and Sylvia Clark, Raja Belle Freeman, and Jen Hallaman for poetry.
Jamie Stewart Crawford (Fiction) (she/they) is a writer and nonprofit administrator. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals such as Suburban Witchcraft, Lit Nerds, The Blunt Space, and AC|DC Journal. Her work has also been featured in the anthologies Unapologetic Love: A Queer Charity Anthology of Radical Resilience and Driftwood and Dreams: Stories Set Along the Great Lakes. Jamie’s short screenplay War Torn, a queer drama, has been a finalist in competitions at the Cindependent Film Festival, the Boston Screenplay Awards, the Nashville Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, and the Caledonia Short Script Competition. Jamie enjoys community building, improv comedy, and 70s rock n' roll.
Eris Eady (Nonfiction) (They/She) is a Black, Bisexual, Non-binary & Disabled minister, consultant, advocate, author, artist and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. They have organized, facilitated, performed, presented, and curated healing spaces all over the country. Eris has worked in the nonprofit and advocacy sector for 25 years. Known as the “Come Out Coach,” Eris equips individuals and organizations with the tools needed to foster identity and cultivate equitably inclusive practices while integrating their role as a Movement Chaplain to ensure emotionally and spiritually safe environments. They have a Master’s of Science in Positive Organizational Development & Change from Case Western Reserve University. Eris is currently a student at Memphis Theological Seminary obtaining a Doctorate of Ministry in Womanist Preaching. They are the proud parent of Yahsiin Zora Venia.
Stafford Hartman (Nonfiction) is a musician, educator, and emerging writer based in Cleveland, OH. A Kentucky native, she spent a decade singing professionally before transitioning to music education. In 2021, she began exploring micro-memoir through @americangirltherapy, an Instagram project chronicling childhood memories tied to her American Girl doll collection. These posts evolved into longer-form writing that explores her experiences as a millennial coming of age in the Bible Belt. She is currently developing a full-length memoir which uses music as a central framework for exploring her lived experiences with class, identity, and recovery. In addition to writing and teaching, Stafford is passionate about creating affirming, accessible spaces for young musicians and encouraging other suburban mothers to fly their freak flags without apology.
Taylor Patterson (Poetry) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer from Northeast Ohio. A graduate of Kent State University in journalism and creative writing, she has taught poetry in settings ranging from public schools to juvenile detention centers. Patterson’s work confronts girlhood, addiction, class, and the breaking and remaking of home. Her current project is a chapbook of poetry and lyrical prose that renders survival, femininity, and the complicated holiness of Midwestern women.
Tristan Summers (Fiction) has lived in four different countries and worked as everything from an English teacher at a rural Chinese school, to a physical therapist assistant teaching stroke patients to walk, to wilderness search and rescue operations in the Blue Ridge mountains. He is a multiple-time finalist of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction contest, as well as the Cuyahoga Community College Emerging Writer Scholarship. He writes in several different genres, but his work is consistently strange, sad, and beautiful.
Michelle Tackla Wallace (Poetry) is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. A daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she often finds herself negotiating different cultures and values, a struggle that informs her poetry. Her work has been published in Rise Up Review, which nominated her poem “An Orphan Argues With the Dead” for a Pushcart Prize; Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves, an anthology of Asian-American poets; Babel, a journal of the International Cities of Refuge Network; and it is slated for inclusion in Poets for Peace: Sunflowers Rising Anthology. She and her mother, Yvette Tackla, co-translated a poem entitled “After One Year of This War” from Arabic into English to be published this fall in the Manhattan Review. Michelle has an MA in English from John Carroll University and works in the healthcare field.
Fiction: Alison Stine
Nonfiction: Zoë Bossiere
Poetry: Philip Metres
We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2024-2025. Literary Cleveland received 111 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Molly Gabriel, Dante DelBene, and Maia White for fiction, Isabella Moreno and Ted Samuel for nonfiction, and Story Rhinehart and Chelsea Daniel for poetry.
Finalists for the residency include Nakiyah Fears, Karim Ragab, and April Simms for fiction; Gina Cortese, Jen Ditlevson Haglund, and Shannise Jackson-Ndiayefor nonfiction; and Sylvia Clark, Jen Hallaman, and Melissa Vincel for poetry.
Chelsea Daniel (Poetry) is an emerging poet born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. As a Black, queer, and disabled woman, Daniel’s work grounds itself in the mundane and extraordinary experiences of Black and LGBTQIA+ American life. In positions at Cleveland Rape Crisis Center and OAESV, Daniel led trauma-informed creative writing workshops for survivors interested in telling their stories through writing. A graduate of Cleveland State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Creative Writing, Daniel was selected in 2015 as a non-fiction fellow for Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA)and mentored by StaceyannChin and Junot Díaz. Working across poetic genres of drama, romance, and magical realism, Daniel is currently developing her first feature-length poetry manuscript.
Dante DelBene (Fiction) is a writer and cinematographer fromYoungstown, Ohio. His professional writing experience includes ad copy and commercial scripts for regional and national brands, as well as a byline in Hypefresh,a news and pop-culture magazine out of Philadelphia. His short fiction has been published in SLAB, Olney Magazine, HASH Journal, RedCoyote, Volney Road Review, and Stoneboat. His career in the production industry inspired a novel about a filmmaker who stumbles upon a humanitarian tragedy that pulls the curtain on content creation.
Molly Gabriel (Fiction) is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, and as the Flash Fiction Editor’s Pick in Barren Magazine. Her story,“XO Training,” was anthologized in the Best Small Fictions of 2020. She was the 2007 recipient of the Robert Fox Award for Young Writers. She read inthe Jax by Jax Literary Festival in 2019. Currently, Molly lives in northeast Ohio with her husband and son where she is working on her first novel.
Isabella Moreno (Nonfiction) is a Nuyorican proudly hailing from the Bronx; writing, gardening and blossoming in Cleveland, Ohio. Her personal writing explores, and gives testament to, memories, recollections and anecdotes influenced by her multi-generational (multi-hyphenated) familial experiences with an ever-changing historical background. She has 30 years of experience in education from K-12 classrooms to non-profit and college administration. For 15+ years she has created workshops for creatives of color. She is the founder of Illuminating Our Voices. She believes joy can always be found in collective spaces of shared creation. Her two adult children add the magical rhythm to her heart.
Story Rhinehart (Poetry) is a writer, choreographer and artist. Her poem “The Day I Met St. Michael Sitting on the Steps of theCuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio” won the 2024 Robinson Jeffer’s TOR House Poetry Prize. Story has been published in The Caribbean Writer.This summer she collaborated with the poet Raja Belle Freeman on the GreekChorus for Batrachomyomachia: The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice: A Tiny Homeric Epic, which was presented by ARTFUL and Art Acts at the Brownhoist Ballroom. Story is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Hathaway Brown School.
Ted Samuel (Nonfiction) is an educator and nonprofit director who centers storytelling in almost every aspect of his work. He earned a B.A. inInternational Studies from Kenyon College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University. His career has spanned three continents where he has conducted ethnographic research, supported local social movements, and facilitated intercultural education. The youngest of five children, Ted grew up in an Indian American immigrant family that settled in northern Appalachia. He’s currently working on a collection of personal essays that explore how material culture—inanimate objects from broken clocks to globs of spit—has steered his navigation of race, heritage, sexuality, faith, and privilege in places that feel both perpetually foreign and intimately familiar.
Maia White (Fiction) is a retired nurse and social worker living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. After working for 24 years as a therapist, she returned to school for a degree in nursing, where she worked for another 17 years in roles that incorporated her social work background with nursing care. Working most of her career with people living in poverty, her work values are centered on providing care that is respectful and empowering. She has loved both reading and writing since she can remember and is working on her first novel.
Fiction: Claire McMillan
Mahoning County - Fiction: DM Pulley
Nonfiction: Athena Dixon
Poetry: Teri Ellen Cross Davis
We are pleased to announce the Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2023-2024. Literary Cleveland received 113 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Patricia Brubaker and Maureen McGuirk for fiction, Libby Chaney and Elizabeth O'Donnellfor nonfiction, and Kristin Gustafson and Jenna Martínez for poetry.
Finalists for the residency include Catherine Fields, Julieanne Lopresto, and Christopher Richards for fiction; Kevin Bain, Meghan Cliffel, and Kristi Majni for nonfiction; and El Bentivegna, Sylvia Clark, and Rosary Kennedy for poetry.
Patricia Brubaker has been writing in some form most of her life. She grew up in a single parent household and worked to save enough money to attend Cleveland State University and receive degrees in English Literature. While getting her degrees, she became the mother of three children but continued to find ways to write. Over twenty years ago she received an Ohio Arts Council Grant, published stories in literary journals, and seemed on her way to a writing career, but life got in her way when she became the guardian of her brother's three children in addition to her own. She began teaching English, earned a counseling degree, and worked as both a school counselor and mental health counselor for the next twenty-some years. Retiring in 2019 has allowed her to return her focus to her first love, writing. She is currently working on a novel about three high school friends, now in their sixties, whose lives are altered when they learn that the bodies of two of their friends who disappeared in 1970 have been found.
Maureen McGuirk earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in writing for film and television from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her short story “Miss Fortunate” was published in quiet Shorts, a Seattle-based arts journal. Her one-act play “A Private Conversation” earned an honorable mention in the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2016, and was published in Two Sisters Writing & Publishing Second Annual Anthology in 2019. In December 2021, her short story “Rule 49” was included in B-Cubed Press’s anthology Alternative Deathiness. Recently, her short story "Last of My Kind" was accepted into Ohio Writers Association's anthology House of Secrets due out this fall. She is at work on a novel about Jason and Morgan, a newly engaged couple in a world where married couples share not only their lives but a single body.
Libby Chaney has always been an artist and writer. She was born, raised and educated in Ohio, but she wandered off to California in her 20’s. There she inadvertently stayed for 47 years. She taught, traveled a bit, married and had 2 children. After her son suddenly died, she was drawn back to her Ohio and the edge of Lake Erie — Cleveland, exactly — where she lives in a studio made from a converted mid-century medical center. She changed its large parking lot into a huge garden. During COVID Libby had a surprise triple bypass heart surgery and might not have survived without the care and love of her third and final husband, Paul Waszink. Neither would the garden. She is at work on a memoir in stories about everything from her high school days when girls were not allowed to take Mechanical Drawing to the 60's in Los Angeles to the loss of her son.
Elizabeth O'Donnell was born and raised in England and is a triplet, one of seven children of a single mother. She left the United Kingdom at age eighteen and emigrated to Canada as a nanny, a job she held for three years while studying part-time to earn acceptance into the University of Toronto, from which she graduated with a degree in physical therapy. Liz later moved to the United States with her partner and raised two sons, attended graduate school where she earned her MSE and PhD in Counseling and currently works full-time as a clinical psychotherapist. Liz is raising yellow- lab, Delta, for Guiding eyes for the Blind until she is sixteen months old when Delta will return to GEB's Canine Development Center to complete her formal seeing-eye dog training. She is at work on a memoir about growing up poor in England in the late 50's and 60's as one of seven children of a single bi-racial mother.
Kristin Gustafson is a poet and editor from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Otterbein University in 2019, and her poetry has been published in over a dozen literary magazines. She currently lives in Cuyahoga Falls with her partner and small dog. Her work infuses her love of internet culture with her struggles with mental illness.
Jenna Martinez is a queer, Mexican-American femme originally from San Antonio, Texas living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in Homology Lit and Femme, Collectively Zine 0.1. Her poem, “Elemental”, was the third place winner of the 2023 One Page Poetry contest. Jenna is a recipient of the Support for Artists grant from the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center funded by Cuyahoga Arts. Her art is influenced by curanderismo, the cosmos, and community. She is at work on a collection of poems exploring how the places she has lived alchemize her intersecting identities including her queerness, Mexican heritage, Texas roots, and Midwestern home.
Fiction: Mary Grimm
Nonfiction: Raechel Anne Jolie
Poetry: Danny Caine
We are pleased to announce the inaugural Breakthrough Writing Residency cohort for 2022-2023. Literary Cleveland received 113 qualified applications across all three categories. This year’s recipients are Sonia Feldman and Andrea Imdacha for fiction, Silk Allen and Michael Loderstedt for nonfiction, and Ricardo Brown and Corey Miller for poetry.
Finalists for the residency include Tiffany Graham Charkosky, Bernard Harris, and Jessie Motts for fiction; Arykah Carter, Michelle Droll, and Cindy Illig for nonfiction; and Kristin Gustafson, Terre Maher, and Tierra Tramble for poetry.
Sonia Feldman is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in journals like The Missouri Review, The Southern Review and Beloit Poetry Journal. She runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, an email newsletter sharing one good poem a week plus commentary. She is at work on a literary coming-of-age novel that explores ways of loving—amicable, familial, romantic and sexual—their profound commonalities and powerful, intangible differences.
Andrea Imdacha is a writer and poet of Sri Lankan and Hungarian heritage who hails from Savannah, GA. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Literary Mama and Mash Stories. Her short story “Mohini Baba” was a finalist for North American Review’s 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Prize in Speculative Literature and is forthcoming in their Fall 2022 edition. Her novel manuscript, Tiberius, was a semi-finalist for the James Kirkwood Prize in Fiction. Andrea lives in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and son. She is currently working on a speculative novel that weaves together elements of global folklore, fairy tales, and gothic tropes, filtering them through a modern lens.
Silk Allen is a storyteller and personal stylist from Cleveland, Ohio whose influences range from fashion, history and music to the words of Iceberg Slim and Lil Kim. Silk received a degree in journalism from Central State University and an associate’s in fashion merchandising from Virginia Marti College, and she has written for local publications like BFly Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Plain Press, and currently The Destination Cleveland Visitor’s Guide. Silk was accepted into the Twelve Literary Arts Baldwin House Urban Writing Residency in 2021 and has attended many Lit Cleveland events over the years, using the workshops to help hone her writing skills. She’s currently working on a collection of essays titled “I Write How I Talk Vol. 1” about coming of age in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Michael Loderstedt is Professor Emeritus of Kent State University where he taught printmaking and photography. He continues to explore new studio and writing projects that investigate the geography, histories, or the natural phenomena of place. His recent manuscript entitled The Yellowhammer’s Cross received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature, and his recent work has been published in Neighborhood Voices, Muleskinner Journal, and the NC Literary Review (receiving the 2021 James Applewhite Prize for Poetry) and was featured in the CAN Triennial. He is currently working on a memoir of his time living on the Outer Banks of NC.
Rico Brown is an artist and writer living in NE Ohio. He started writing poetry as part of trauma therapy, and it has since become a passion. Rico is currently working on a collection of poems about his life as a queer man of color, trauma survivor, and recovered drug addict living with depression.
Corey Miller’s writing has appeared in Booth, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He reads for TriQuarterly, Longleaf Review, and Barren Magazine. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he likes to take the dogs for adventures. Corey is currently working on a manuscript of environmental poems that pair with photographs.
Fiction: Laura Maylene Walter
Nonfiction: Eliese Colette Goldbach
Poetry: Kelly Harris-DeBerry
Alison Stine is the author of the novels Trashlands, Road Out of Winter, and Dust (St. Martin’s Press, 2024). Her journalism has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. Her creative writing has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, Vogue, VQR, Poetry, and others. Alison holds a PhD from Ohio University and lives with her son in Ohio.
Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and co-editor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Bossiere's debut book, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir, is forthcoming in May 2024 from Abrams Books. Learn more at zoebossiere.com
Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon 2024). Winner of Guggenheim, Lannan, and NEA fellowships, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and core faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA.
