New Fellows & Scholars

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

New this year, the Ashley Bryan Fellowships are named in honor of the life and work of Bryan (below, top left), author of more than fifty books and recipient of many awards including MWPA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2017. Bryan Fellows receive a five-year membership to MWPA with some free workshops each year as well as other forms of support; fellowships are awarded to emerging Maine writers who are Black, people of color, and/or members of one of the Wabanaki Nations or other Native peoples. Two award-winning writers of color acted as the jurors this year and have chosen seven writers as the first Bryan Fellows.

The 2021 Bryan Fellows include (below, clockwise from left to right) musician, writer, tutor, and translator Johan Alexander Fenney, who grew up in Belfast and lives in Portland; writer and copywriter Liz Iverson, who lives in Portland; writer and podcaster Zahir Janmohamed, who is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College; writer and social worker Ariele Le Grand who lives on Mount Desert Island; writer, mother, and Portland resident Coco McCracken; writer, playwright, mother, and Portland native Christina Richardson; and scholar, data analyst, research consultant, and writer Ning Sullivan, who grew up in Mainland China and has lived in Wells for twenty-two years. A full bio for each Ashley Bryan Fellow appears below.

In 2022 and in each year to follow, five Bryan Fellowships will be awarded through an open application process with a subset of the current fellows and/or other BIPOC writers acting as jurors. The MWPA thanks writer Stephanie Cotsirilos for the original matching support to establish the Ashley Bryan Fellowship, as well as to the other MWPA donors who help make this fellowship possible.

In September, thanks to an ongoing partnership with the Maine Community Foundation, the MWPA awarded a Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship to Rosanna Gargiulo (below, at right) to attend the Harvest Writers Retreat, all expenses paid, and work on her fiction with writer and Bates College teacher Jessica Anthony. Gargiulo’s award-winning work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Tahoma Literary Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, New South, and elsewhere. She is the Editor of The Maine Review and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Thanks to a partnership with Monson Arts, three MWPA jurors recently selected (below, left to right) poet Robert Carr, nonfiction writer Stephanie Harp, and fiction writer Loie Rawding to receive residencies at Monson Arts in 2022. A full bio for each writer appears below.

And, finally, thanks to the ongoing support of NYT-bestselling writer Christina Baker Kline, two MWPA jurors recently selected Zoë Romano (above, at left) as this year’s Christina Baker Kline Scholar. Romano will receive a membership and free workshops at MWPA, as well as a chance to meet and consult with Baker Kline. Romano is a writer and teacher at Waynflete School, where she works one-on-one with students, tutoring reading, writing, and Spanish. She is a trained Narrative4 Story Exchange Facilitator and has led Story Exchanges with eighth-graders and faculty at Waynflete. In 2018, Romano completed a fiction MFA through Queens University. As a Rotary Global Scholar during her graduate program, she completed semesters of service in Argentina, where she taught creative writing and English, and attended writing residencies in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.

The MWPA congratulates all of these writers on their fellowships and scholarships, as well as all of those who applied this year. Each of these opportunities will open again for submissions in the fall of 2022. Submissions are being accepted through October 31 for the Maine Chapbook Series. Award-winning nonfiction writer Melissa Febos will choose one nonfiction manuscript to be published as a chapbook in 2022. For more information on any of these opportunities, visit mainewriters.org.

2021 Ashley Bryan Fellows

Johan Alexander Fenney is a musician, tutor, and translator based in Portland, Maine. Born in Medellin, Colombia, and adopted at 18 months, he grew up in and around Belfast, Maine. After spending years abroad in South America and subsequently returning to Maine, he currently spends a few months every year in his birth country teaching ESL.

Zahir Janmohamed is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded, Racist Sandwich, was nominated for a James Beard Award.

Liz Iversen was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Dakota. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, Room, and J Journal: New Writing on Justice. She has received support from Tin House and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Currently based in Portland, Maine, she is a copywriter for a radio and podcast advertising agency. You can find her online at liziversen.com.

Ariele Le Grand is a first generation American/Brooklyn-born black woman. She is a writer and social worker living on Mount Desert Island with her partner and their tree climbing dog. Ms. Le Grand’s first story was recently published in Split Lip Magazine. Her work was also selected as a finalist in the 2019 – 2020 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest. Ms. Le Grand received her MFA last spring from Temple University, where she also taught fiction and first year writing.

Born into a mixed-race family in Toronto, Coco McCracken has always been interested in writing about the intersectionality of place, race, and identity. With mystery shrouding her ancestry, her work is equal parts detective work and rhetorical relief, which comes from examining what it means to be a half-Asian, half-white woman, today. Now, raising a young daughter in Maine she embarks on her new immigrant identity as half-Canadian, half-American. Coco currently has a newsletter called Coco’s Echo, writes a monthly column for Amjambo Africa, and is working on her first memoir.

Christina Richardson is a Black-identified mixed race Portland native with a love for community, equity, creativity, and the little things. Spending as much time as she can with her daughter, Laila, she also works as a Supervisor at the Portland Public Library. She was a Team Member for the 2020’s Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival, a co-playwright for Bare Portland’s ‘Storage’, and has served positions for Mayo Street Arts and The For Us, By Us Fund, was a Committee Member for The City of Portland MLK Task Force, and has held many other positions within the Greater Portland Community.

Ning Sullivan was born and grew up in a turbulent time in Mainland China. She taught political economics and philosophy at college and graduate school level. In 1993, at age 35, she left China for Sweden as a visiting scholar. She later came to the United States to pursue an advanced degree in Applied Sociology and Research Methods. She taught statistics, worked as a data analyst and research consultant, and published research papers on Asian American mental health. In May 2021, she was invited to participate a reading at a Cultural Event sponsored by Boston Major’s Office: Emerging Writers from Grubstreet: A Reading and Conversation Hosted by Artist Fellow Shubha Sunder. Her short story Mizugiwa will be published in an upcoming issue of Massachusetts Review. She lives in Wells, with her husband of 22 years.

MWPA's 2022 Monson Residents

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. A five time Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry appears, or is forthcoming, in the Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner Journal, The Maine Review, Shenandoah and Sixth Finch. Robert is a contributing author for Writing the Land, an anthology series partnering poets and land trusts. In collaboration with the Ghana Writes Literary Group, he is one of three international editors for the 2019 poetry anthology, Bodies and Scars. Robert lives in Monmouth with his husband Stephen, and additional information can be found at robertcarr.org

Loie Rawding grew up on Cliff Island, in Casco Bay. In 2016, she received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Colorado and gave birth to twins. She has since served as a Visiting Lecturer at her Alma Mater. She is currently a Senior Teaching Artist at the Porch Writers Collective and mentors private clients in Maine, New York, Colorado, and Tennessee. Her work has been featured internationally in 3:AM Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, The Ekphrastic Review (Toronto), The Wanderer, and SAND (Berlin), among others. Her debut novel, Tight Little Vocal Cords, was released from KERNPUNKT Press in November 2020. For more information: www.loierawding.com.

Stephanie Harp has worked in journalism, public relations, arts administration, and development. In graduate school, she studied the American South to untangle contradictions in that culture and her own family’s roots there. Since 2008, her business – HarpWorks Writing – has offered writing, editing, grant writing, publicity, and research. Her essay, “Stories of a Lynching: Accounts of John Carter, 1927,” appeared in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950 (University of Arkansas Press, 2018). “On Being Involved,” detailing her connections with the victims’ families, was published in Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press, 2019). She has presented her research at various events, including “Project 1927” (Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, Little Rock) and “Without Sanctuary: A Conference on Lynching and the American South” (UNC – Charlotte). She’s published journalism and creative nonfiction in Arkansas, Maine, and Virginia, and regularly contributes to Amjambo Africa.