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, 2024-2025 residents will also receive a monthly stipend of $200 to support their work. Plus new this year we will be able to accept a seventh resident specifically from Mahoning County (see info below).
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 a 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.
Applications for the 2024-2025 residency are open now through July 29, 2024.
Thanks to special funding as well as support from Lit Youngstown, we will have one additional resident in 2024-2025 from Mahoning County. If you currently live or work in Mahoning County please check the appropriate box on the application form to be considered for this spot (regardless of genre).
Residents will work year round with the mentor in their genre. These mentors have experience with publishing, teaching, attending residencies, and receiving fellowships. They will help set your work plan for the year and will keep you accountable to writing deadlines and goals.
Fiction: Claire McMillan
Nonfiction: Athena Dixon
Poetry: Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Learn more about the 2024-2025 mentors below.
Applications are currently closed for the 2024-2025 residency. Check back in late spring 2025 for applications to open for the next cohort.
Applications are reviewed by an independent panel of writers working in a variety of disciplines. The panel will select finalists based on the following criteria:
Mentors will then select participants from the list of finalists.
Questions? Email info@litcleveland.org
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.
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, 2024-2025 residents will also receive a monthly stipend of $200 to support their work. Plus new this year we will be able to accept a seventh resident specifically from Mahoning County (see info below).
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 a 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.
Applications for the 2024-2025 residency are open now through July 29, 2024.
Thanks to special funding as well as support from Lit Youngstown, we will have one additional resident in 2024-2025 from Mahoning County. If you currently live or work in Mahoning County please check the appropriate box on the application form to be considered for this spot (regardless of genre).
Residents will work year round with the mentor in their genre. These mentors have experience with publishing, teaching, attending residencies, and receiving fellowships. They will help set your work plan for the year and will keep you accountable to writing deadlines and goals.
Fiction: Claire McMillan
Nonfiction: Athena Dixon
Poetry: Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Learn more about the 2024-2025 mentors below.
Applications are currently closed for the 2024-2025 residency. Check back in late spring 2025 for applications to open for the next cohort.
Applications are reviewed by an independent panel of writers working in a variety of disciplines. The panel will select finalists based on the following criteria:
Mentors will then select participants from the list of finalists.
Questions? Email info@litcleveland.org
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.
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
Claire McMillan is the author of Alchemy of a Blackbird, The Necklace and Gilded Age, which was inspired by Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. She was the 2017–2018 Cuyahoga County Writer-in-Residence and currently serves as a member of the board of trustees of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is the author of the memoir in essays The Loneliness Files (Tin House 2023), the essay collection The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press 2020) and No God in This Room (Winner of the Intersectional Midwest Chapbook Contest, Argus House Press 2018).
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of Haint (Gival Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is a Cave Canem fellow and works as the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She lives in Maryland.
