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2024 Featured Authors and Speakers
2024 Special Guests
A$iahMae
A$iahMae
AsiahMae, stylized A$iahMae, (they/she) is a Black, non-binary Southern poet, humorist and curator with roots in Georgia, South and North Carolina. A multi-hyphenated artist, their background spans across film, curation, production, performance and language arts. Their work is an attempt to document the duality of the internal exploration and external expression of spirit, love, ritual and Black Southern connection to land and sea. A$iahmae is a Watering Hole Fellow and has been featured in The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston Food & Wine Festival, The Charleston Literary Festival, and most recently in This is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, curated by Kwame Alexander. They are currently serving as the Second Poet Laureate of Charleston, SC.
Alexandra Hinrichs
Alexandra Hinrichs
Alexandra Hinrichs is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction children’s books. She is represented by Stephen Fraser of the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency.
Alexandra has worked as a librarian in school, public, and academic libraries; a historical researcher at American Girl; and a children’s bookseller. She earned MAs in United States History and Library & Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her undergraduate education at Colgate University, where she majored in History and French. Alexandra grew up in Princeton, Massachusetts. She has also lived in France and Thailand. She now makes her home in Bangor, Maine with her husband, three wild sons, and two tame cats. When she isn’t buried in books, she can usually be found baking, hiking, kayaking, or playing board games.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson
Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson
Andrea Sanderson performs as “Vocab” in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. She teaches poetry workshops, mentors, builds up and encourages artists to pursue their art, and gives them platforms to showcase their talent.
Her poetry is published in, The Texas Observer, January 2016 Issue, Pariah Anthology SFA Press, March 2016, and Sycorax’s Daughters, Cedar Grove Publishing, January 2017, Soundbite Vol. 3, Anti-Languorous Project, Spring 2019. Her debut book entitled: She Lives In Music, published on Flower Song Press, was released on Valentine’s Day 2020. Her album She Tastes Like Music, is available on all music streaming platforms.
She received awards, Performer of the Year, Influencer of the Year, from Project Forward, and Dream Voice, from the Dream Week Commission. Sanderson is the winner of the 2019 People’s Choice Award, awarded by Luminaria Artist Foundation (formerly known as: Artist Foundation of San Antonio).In May of 2020 she was awarded Best Live Entertainment/Band Musician of the Year by the SEA Awards.
Andrés Vera Martinez
Andrés Vera Martines
Andrés Vera Martínez is a cartoonist, author and illustrator originally from Texas. He is the co-creator and illustrator of the Junior Library Gold selected graphic novel series, Monster Locker. He is also the co-author and illustrator of the graphic memoir, Little White Duck: A Childhood in China, which received starred reviews from Kirkus, The Horn Book Magazine, and the School Library Journal. Andrés illustrated Neal Shusterman's Courage to Dream: Tales of Hope in the Holocaust, which received the ALA Sydney Taylor Silver Medal. He is also adapting Pam Muñoz Ryan’s beloved novel, Esperanza Rising as a graphic novel for the books 25th anniversary. Andrés now resides in New England with his family.
Arisa White
Arisa White
Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, Sarah Lawrence College alumna, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, Black Pearl, Perfect on Accident, and “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. Her current publications are the poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy and the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, co-edited with Miah Jeffra and Monique Mero and published by Foglifter Press. In collaboration with composer Jessica Jones, Arisa is working on Post Pardon: The Opera, which will premiere in 2025. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2005, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2019, her poetry has been published widely and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet.
Cameron Kelly Rosenblum
Cameron Kelly Rosenblum
Cameron Kelly Rosenblum is the author of The Stepping Off Place, named a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Top 10 YA Dealing with Mental Health. Her second novel The Sharp Edge of Silence was released in the US and UK in April 2023. Her books have been translated into Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and German. Cameron has been a teacher and a children’s librarian. She lives on the Maine coast with her family.
Charlotte Agell
Charlotte Agell
Charlotte Agell is the author/illustrator of many books for children, as well as one "teacher book." Originally from Sweden, she grew up also in Canada and Hong Kong. She came to Maine for college and has been a happy camper here ever since. She is a recently retired public school teacher and lifelong practicing artist. Charlotte is a member of ARRT!, the Artists' Rapid Response Team.
Chartreuse Money
Chartreuse Money
Chartreuse Money (She/they) has been performing their whole life, and doing drag since 2018. A “self-proclaimed drag queen” according to News 8 WMTW, Chartreuse has worked and performed at RuPaul’s Drag Con NYC, performed alongside Miz Cracker (RuPauls Drag Race Season 10 and All Stars 5), Mateo Lane (Netflix, HBO, Comedy Central) and even secured her own comedy drag show at Stand Up! NY, though the show never happened due to Covid-19.
Chartreuse was named Best Drag Personality 2023 for the Best of Portland Awards, working closely with organizations like Equality Maine, Portland Ovations and more. She is known for her work with children, most recently through Portland Ovations Drag Story Hour program, and her involvement with EQME’s New Leaders Project from 2021 to 2022. Chartreuse currently is the producer and host of Batson River Drag Brunch in Portland, Drag Disco Dinner series at Sur Lie in Portland, and hosts weekly and bi weekly events at Blackstones (CHAR-AOKE: Werkly Karaoke) and Cocktail Mary (Therapy Thursday). Chartreuse is a proud member of Curbside Queens.
Chen Chen
Chen Chen
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include the National Book Award longlist, the Thom Gunn Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.
Diannely Antigua
Diannely Antigua
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. In 2022, she was proclaimed the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.
Emily Lowe
Emily Lowe
Emily Lowe is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and educator. She holds an MFA from UNCW where she was the 2019-2020 Philip Gerard writing fellow. She is an editor for The Rejoinder, a magazine of serialized fiction, and her writing can be found in The Chicago Review, The Normal School, No Contact Magazine and River Teeth Journal among others. She is currently at work on a collection of stories centered around queer fairy tales and a novel that circles sapphic obsession. More on Emily at emilylowewriter.com.
Franny Choi
Franny Choi
Franny Choi is the author of several books, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco Books 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Their poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is currently Faculty in Literature at Bennington College and the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.
Gail Donovan
Gail Donovan
Gail Donovan was fired from her first job in an ice cream shop for making the sundaes too big. She now works in a library and writes middle grade novels, including Sparrow Being Sparrow, the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award winner Finchosaurus, and In Memory of Gorfman T. Frog, named to the New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing list. Donovan lives on the coast of Maine, where she jumps in the ocean all year round.
Ghassan Zeineddine
Ghassan Zeineddine
Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, DC, and raised in the Middle East. He is the author of the story collection Dearborn (Tin House) and coeditor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging (Wayne State University Press). His fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, the Arkansas International, Witness, Pleiades, Fiction International, the Common, Epiphany, FOLIO, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and the Iron Horse Literary Review, among other publications. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College and lives with his wife and two daughters in Ohio.
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Jaed Coffin
Jaed Coffin
Jaed Coffin is the author of the memoirs A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants and Roughhouse Friday. His work has been featured in the New York Times, The Sun Magazine, Snap Judgment, Moth Radio Hour and TED Channel. A regular contributor to Down East magazine, he teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives with his family in Maine.
Jamie Hogan
Jamie Hogan
Jamie Hogan is an award-winning illustrator, educator, and biker living three miles out to sea.
She grew up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and earned a BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design.
Her illustrations have appeared in books and magazines as well as winning merit from the Maine Advertising Club, the 3 x 3 Illustration Annual, American Illustration, PRINT Magazine, Graphis, and the Society of Illustrators.
She is the author and illustrator of Skywatcher and also The Seven Days of Daisy, as well as the illustrator of a dozen children’s books and adult titles. She illustrated Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins, winner of the Jane Addams Peace Association Award and named on the New York Public Library’s list of 100 Best Books and now a motion picture!
Jamie was an adjunct professor at Maine College of Art in Portland from 2003 to 2018, teaching courses in the BFA Illustration program and Continuing Studies. She is currently a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.
Jason Brown
Jason Brown
Jason Brown is a fiction and nonfiction writer. He was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a professor and the Director of the MFA Program. He has published three books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House), Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic), and A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, published in the fall of 2019 as part of the short fiction series by Missouri Review Books. His stories and essays have won several awards and appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The L.A. Times, The Guardian, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Missouri Review, and other venues. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Jason’s third book of stories won the Maine Literary Prize for Fiction and an Independent Publisher Book Award. In the fall of 2024 a novel called Outermark will be published by Paul Dry Books, and in 2025 a memoir called Character Witness will be published by the American Lives Series.
Jen Soriano
Jen Soriano
Jen Soriano (she/they) is a Filipinx-American lyric essayist and performer living on unceded Duwamish territory in Seattle. They are the author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry, and the lyric essay collection Nervous, now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.
Jen has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. They are particularly proud to have been selected as a Jack Jones Yi Dae Up Fellow, thanks to a scholarship founded by Alexander Chee in honor of his grandmother. She is co-editor of Amanda Solomon Amorao and DJ Kuttin Kandi’s anthology Closer to Liberation: Pin[a/x]y Activism in Theory and Practice. She is also the author of "Multiplicity From the Margins," published by Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, which explores the potential of intersectional form to disrupt oppressive narratives and expand narrow worldviews.
Jen was the 2022-2023 poet in residence with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. She holds a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in nonfiction and fiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She works as an organizational development consultant and narrative strategist for social justice institutions, and is a co-founder of the digital rights and narrative power building organizations MediaJustice and ReFrame.
Johan Alexander Fenney
Johan Alexander Fenney
Johan Alexander's work has received support from Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Periplus Collective, and Anaphora Arts Writing Residencies, and he was an inaugural Maine Lit Fest Fellow in 2022. His last three written pieces appear in LatineLit Winter ’24, Eunoia Review, and the Periplus Anthology. Born in Medellín, Colombia, he currently lives in Portland, Maine. Everything at http://johanalexander.com
John Cariani
John Cariani
John Cariani is a Tony Award-nominated actor and an accomplished playwright. As a playwright, he is best known for his first play, Almost, Maine, which premiered at Portland Stage Company in 2004, opened Off-Broadway in 2006, and has since become one of the most popular plays in the United States and around the world. The play has received over 5000 productions to date and has been translated into over a dozen languages. It’s also the most frequently produced play in North American high schools, outpacing classics like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Crucible, and Our Town. A darker cousin to Almost, Maine, John’s third play, LOVE/SICK is a huge hit in Mexico City, where it has been made into a film starring Eréndira Ibarra (Sense8). The play will soon be touring Spain with Spanish television star Esther Acebo (Money Heist). John is also a novelist, and his debut novel, Almost, Maine-a novel, was recently published by Fiewel and Friends, an imprint of MacMillan.
As an actor, John is best known for his role on NBC’s long-running drama, Law & Order, on which he played Forensics Tech Beck for five seasons. He also had recurring roles on CBS’ Numbers and on IFC’s The Onion News Network. He has appeared in several Broadway shows, including Fiddler on the Roof. His portrayal of Motel the Tailor earned him an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award nomination. He originated the role of Nigel Bottom in the hit, Something Rotten! and received an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for his performance. He also originated the role of Itzik in The Band’s Visit, winner of the 2018 Tony Award for Best Musical, and he recently appeared as Stuart Gellman in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s acclaimed revival of Caroline, or Change.
John grew up in Presque Isle and now lives in The Bronx.
Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, small-town librarian and Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2026). Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received the Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book. Other honors include the Poet’s Out Loud Prize (2016-17), the Cider Press Review Book Award (2015), and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts (Monson, ME), and Annex Arts (Castine, ME). Bouwsma’s poems and book reviews can be found in Cutthroat, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME.
Juliana Lamy
Juliana Lamy
Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She received her Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. While there, she was also the recipient of the university’s Le Baron Russell Brigg’s Prize for Undergraduate Fiction, as well as the Gordon Parks Essay Prize for Nonfiction. She is the author of You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023). She really is 6”2, she swears.
Junious 'Jay' Ward
Junious ‘Jay’ Ward
Junious 'Jay' Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte's inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.
Katrina Niidas Holm
Katrina Niidas Holm
Katrina Niidas Holm is a freelance writer and book reviewer who regularly contributes to Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Mystery Scene Magazine. She also did time with The Life Sentence as an editor and social media maven. She lives in Portland with her husband, writer Chris Holm.
Keziah Weir
Keziah Weir
Keziah Weir is the author of the novel The Mythmakers, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a best book of the year by Harper's Bazaar and Barnes & Noble. She is a senior editor at Vanity Fair. Her writing has also appeared in Elle, Esquire, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She grew up in San Francisco, California and on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and now lives in Maine.
Kimberly Ridley
Kimberly Ridley
Award-winning author Kimberly Ridley writes creative nonfiction books about nature for kids and their grown-ups. Her books have received the Maine Library Association’s Lupine Award, two national Riverby Awards from the John Burroughs Association, and been named a Best STEM Book by the Bank Street College of Education, among other honors. She has taught nonfiction writing workshops to thousands of students, which gives her great joy. Kimberly lives in Brooklin with her husband the painter Tom Curry and their cat Andy, who’s named after E.B. White.
Leila Christine Nadir
Leila Christine Nadir
Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist and writer whose work appears in literary and scholarly journals, in museums and galleries, and in forests, classrooms, and kitchens. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Khôra, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, ASAP, and Aster(ix), and has been supported by awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the de Groot Foundation, and Aspen Words. More info: https://leilanadir.xyz/. Instagram: @afghan_vegan
Lindz Amer
Lindz Amer
Lindz Amer makes queer stuff for kids, parents, educators, and allies. They created their award-winning LGBTQ+ family webseries Queer Kid Stuff in 2016 which now has 4M lifetime views and counting! They are the author of the nonfiction parenting book Rainbow Parenting: Your Guide to Raising Queer Kid and Their Allies (St. Martin's Press) and their picture book Hooray for She, He, Ze, and They! What Are YOUR Pronouns Today? (Simon & Schuster, February 2024). Currently, they host the Rainbow Parenting podcast, and perform at schools and libraries across the country, while writing and consulting for children’s television. They worked with Nick Jr on the Webby award-winning Blues Clues & You “Pride Parade” music video, wrote for The Fabulous Show with Fay and Fluffy, created the first nonbinary character in the Paw Patrol universe on the spin-off Rubble and Crew, and more! You can watch their viral TED Talk on why kids need to learn about gender and sexuality and learn more about their work over at queerkidstuff.com.
Liz Iverson
Liz Iverson
Liz Iversen was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Dakota. A Tin House Scholar, Ashley Bryan Fellow, and Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. She lives in South Portland with her husband and children, where she is at work on a novel. You can find her online at Liziversen.com.
Lloyd Archer
Lloyd Archer
Lloyd Archer - an Aroostook County native grew up in Presque Isle and has lived in Mapleton since 1979. Retired after 39 years in the beverage industry. Started writing poetry at the age of fifty, then short stories, essays, memoirs, and a novel. Published in Echoes, Bangor Daily News and supplements, Goose River Press, and North Woods Sporting Journal. Combined photos and poems in framed works and self-published a collection of poems in a four-book set.
Lynda Barry
Lynda Barry
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison.
Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook's Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award.
She has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics, which received two Eisner Awards and appeared on numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Barry was born in Wisconsin in 1956.
Marjorie Liu
Marjorie Liu
Marjorie Liu is an attorney and New York Times bestselling novelist and comic book writer. Her work at Marvel includes X-23, Black Widow, Han Solo, Dark Wolverine and Astonishing X-Men, for which she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding media images of the LGBTQ community. She is also the co-creator of Monstress from Image Comics, which has won multiple Hugo Awards, British Fantasy Awards, the Harvey Award, and five Eisner Awards, making Liu the first-ever woman (and woman of color) to win an Eisner in the Best Writer category. She teaches comic book writing at MIT.
Maryann Cocca-Leffler
Maryann Cocca-Leffler
Maryann Cocca-Leffler is the award-winning author and illustrator of over seventy books for children, including Don’t Ask Cat and The Power of Yet. Her celebrated books on the topic of disability rights are Janine, We Want to Go to School! The Fight for Disability Rights, co-authored with Maryann’s daughter, Janine Leffler, and Fighting for Yes! The Story of Disability Rights Activist Judith Heumann, the 2023 Maine Literary Award winner as well as the 2023 NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) Orbis Pictus Award Honor Book. Maryann lives and works in Portland, Maine. FMI: maryanncoccaleffler.com
Maya Williams
Maya Williams
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who was selected as Portland, ME's seventh poet laureate for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Maya received a MFA in Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry from Randolph College in June 2022. Eir debut poetry collection Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023) was selected as a finalist for the New England Book Award. They also have a second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date (Harbor Editions, 2023). Maya was selected as one of The Advocate's Champions of Pride in 2022 and one of Maine Humanities Council's recipients of the Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024. Follow her at mayawilliamspoet.com
Meghan Wilson Duff
Meghan Wilson Duff
Meghan Wilson Duff is the author of the picture book How Are You, Verity?, illustrated by Taylor Barron and released by Magination Press. They wanted to be a marine biologist when they grew up but got distracted trying to figure out people and became a clinical psychologist. They are faculty in University of Maine at Machias’s Psychology & Community Studies program and love working with students.
Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the nationally bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which has been translated into seven languages and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred. A. Knopf.
The recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, Melissa's work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.
Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and others. She is a four-time MacDowell fellow and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, The Bogliasco Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute at The Camargo Foundation, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which named her the 2018 recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award.
She co-curated the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan for ten years and served on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts for five. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is a full professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Melissa Ferrer Civil
Melissa Ferrer Civil
Melissa Ferrer Civil (she/they) is a poet, organizer, and educator living on Kaw, Kickapoo, Kansa, and Oceti Sakowin lands. A self proclaimed artist-in-exile, they are preoccupied with constructing new communication for the manifestation of a home we all hold in our hearts. Having delved through the hellish catacombs of mental illness, Melissa emerges with new language forged in the fires of transformation. In 2020, Melissa published her first chapbook, BIRTHING PAINS, through turnsol editions. Melissa received their MFA in Creative Writing from Randolph College, and is a Charlotte Street Studio Resident, Chrysalis Institute Alumni and the first Poet Laureate of Kansas City, MO. They are the founder of the arts and organizing event series A Nation In Exile. You can find their publications and videos on their website www.melissaferrerand.com. You can find their performance updates on their instagram: @melissaferrerand. You can also follow A Nation In Exile on instagram and at their website of the same name.
Melissa Sweet
Melissa Sweet
Melissa Sweet is an award-winning author and illustrator of many children’s books including the New York Times bestseller, Some Writer! The Story of E. B. White, and Balloons Over Broadway. She’s currently illustrating a book by the poet Mary Oliver. Along with being a Maine master naturalist and Maine Guide, Sweet teaches nature journaling and documenting the natural world with words and images. She lives in Portland, Maine.
Michael Colbert
Michael Colbert
Michael Colbert is a gay writer and editor based in Portland, where he’s at work on a novel. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, where he taught creative writing and was a 2021 Brauer Fellow, and attended the Tin House Summer Workshop. He’s the founding editor of The Rejoinder and has served as a reader for Ecotone and Story, and as an editor and columnist for No Contact. His writing appears in One Story, Esquire, NYLON, Down East, Decor Maine, and the Cincinnati Review, among others.
Michael Paterniti
Michael Paterniti
Michael Paterniti is a journalist, an essayist, and the bestselling author of Driving Mr. Albert and The Telling Room, named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor. Nominated for the National Magazine Award eight times, he is also the recipient of an NEA grant and two MacDowell Fellowships. His stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s, Outside, Esquire, and GQ, where he works as a correspondent. He is the co-founder of a youth storytelling center in Portland, Maine, where he lives with his wife and their three children.
Michele Cobb
Michele Cobb
Michele Cobb has served on the Audio Publishers Association board since 2001, as a director and officer, and is currently Executive Director. She is a partner at Forte Business Consulting, which provides Business Development services for the publishing industry, and she is Publisher of both AudioFile Magazine and MMB Media.
Minquansis Sapiel
Minquansis Sapiel
Minquansis Sapiel a Member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe from Sipayik Maine. She grew up overlooking the Passamaquoddy Bay and playing on the shoreline with her friends. She has a Masters in Social Work and her captains license and is working toward providing boat tours speaking about the Passamaquoddy people and their connection to the whales and waterways in Maine. Sapiel’s first children’s book, Little People of the Dawn, was published in 2023.
Mira Ptacin
Mira Ptacin
Mira Ptacin is a literary journalist, memoirist, New York Times best-selling ghostwriter, editor, and professor of creative writing. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press, 2016), which was named a best book of the year by Kirkus Books, where it received a rare “starred” review. She’s also the author of the genre-blending book of feminist history, memoir, and ethnography, The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna (Liveright-W.W. Norton, 2019), which the New York Times lauded as the best book to read during a pandemic. Mira’s writing frequently appears in the New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Poets and Writers, Harper’s, Tin House, LitHub, and more. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was editor-at-large of their literary magazine, LUMINA. Mira lives on Peaks Island, Maine, and is currently working on her next book.
Mo Drammeh
Mo Drammeh
Mo Drammeh is a freshman at the University of Maine and a member of the Honors College. He was among Maine Magazine's Mainers of The Year in 2022 for his writing, was the winner of the 2022 Crime Flash Competition, and is a 2023 Macklin Fellow. Mo grew up in Bangor, Maine, and has lived there all his life.
Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, is the author of the national bestselling and critically acclaimed story collection Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, which won the New England Book Award, was a Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, and is a Finalist for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.
Paul Doiron
Paul Doiron
Paul Doiron is the best-selling author of the Mike Bowditch series of crime novels set in the Maine woods. His first book, The Poacher’s Son, won the Barry Award and the Strand Critics Award and was nominated for an Edgar for Best First Novel. His second, Trespasser, won the 2012 Maine Literary Award. His novelette “Rabid” was a finalist for the 2019 Edgar in the Best Short Story category. Paul’s twelfth book, Dead by Dawn won the New England Society’s 2022 Book Award for Fiction, as well as his second Maine Literary Award. It was also a finalist for the Barry Award. His books have been translated into 11 languages.
Paul is the former chair of the Maine Humanities Council, Editor Emeritus of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, and a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing.
Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of Survivor Song, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, the crime novels The Little Sleepand No Sleep Till Wonderland, and the short story collection, Growing Things and Other Stories. Horror Movie is his latest novel.
His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.
Peter Brown
Peter Brown
Peter Brown is an author and illustrator of children’s books. His titles include New York Times bestsellers like The Wild Robot, The Curious Garden, Children Make Terrible Pets, and Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. Peter received a Caldecott Honor for his illustrations in the picture book Creepy Carrots! The Wild Robot movie (Dreamworks Animation) will open in theaters on September 20, 2024
Phuc Tran
Phuc Tran
Phuc Tran is a writer, tattooer, and classicist— has a lane-swerving résumé. He is the author of the memoir SIGH, GONE A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In which won the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. SIGH, GONE was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, Audible, Kirkus Reviews, and many other publications.
He has been a high school Latin teacher and tattooer for over twenty years, for which he has won no awards. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s TED Radio Hour. He is also the author of a children’s book series in collaboration with bestselling illustrator Pete Oswald entitled CRANKY. He has been a live storyteller in and around Portland Maine since 2016 for a variety of organizations and events including SoundBites, Show and Tell, Slant, and others. In 2023, he was a storyteller for The Moth Mainstage. Phuc lives in Portland with his wife and two daughters.
Rebecca Turkewitz
Rebecca Turkewitz
Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection Here in the Night, which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards and named one of Debutiful’s Best Debuts of 2023. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, Best Microfiction 2023and 2024, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University.
Robert Gipe
Robert Gipe
Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel Trampoline. His second novel, Weedeater, was published in 2018. His third novel, Pop, was published in 2021. All three novels are published by Ohio University Press. In 2021, the trilogy won the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. From 1997 to 2018, Gipe directed the Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College Appalachian Program in Harlan. Gipe is founding producer of the Higher Ground community performance series and has served as a script consultant for the Hulu series Dopesick and a producer on the feature film The Evening Hour. Gipe resides in Harlan County, Kentucky. He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee.
Sahar Muradi
Sahar Muradi
Sahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is author of the chapbook [ G A T E S ], the hybrid memoir Ask Hafiz (winner of the 2021 Patrons’ Prize for Emerging Artists from Thornwillow Press), and the chaplet A Garden Beyond My Hand. She is co-editor, with Seelai Karzai, of EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora; and co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Sahar is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award in Poetry, a Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, and twice recipient of the Himan Brown Poetry Award. Her writing has been supported by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bethany Arts Community, Blue Mountain Center, and WOC Writers. She is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association, directs the arts education programs at City Lore, and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot. saharmuradi.com
Ryan Bani Tahmaseb
Ryan Bani Tahmaseb
Ryan Bani Tahmaseb is an author, K-12 academic coach, and curriculum developer. His debut picture book, Rostam’s Picture-Day Pusteen, was published by Charlesbridge in 2024, and his first professional book for educators, The 21st Century School Library, was published in 2021 by John Catt Educational. His writing has also appeared in publications such as Education Week and the Carolina Quarterly. He lives in Southern Maine with his wife and two young children.
Samara Cole Doyon
Samara Cole Doyon
Samara Cole Doyon is a poet, educator, and award-winning children’s book author living on unceded Wabanaki / Abenaki territory. She is a neurodivergent mother of neurodivergent children, continually learning more from her progeny than they could ever learn from her. She earned both a Lupine Award and an International Literacy Association Award for her debut picture book, Magnificent Homespun Brown (Tilbury House, January, 2020). Next Level (Tilbury House, 2024) is her third picture book and a love letter to her amazing, non-speaking, Autistic son. It has been in the world 3 months, and has already garnered a star review from Kirkus and glowing praise from bookstagrammers like Maya Lê from MaiStoryBook and Kristin from Reading with Red + the Magpie. Samara works at Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and resides with her husband, two children, and rescue pup in central Maine.
Sarah Sax
Sarah Sax
Sarah Sax grew up in St. Louis on Uncle Scrooge and Sailor Moon comics. She studied storytelling and sequential imagery at Hampshire College and worked in education and gaming before starting her publishing journey. She is the illustrator of three installments in the Escape This Book series and is the creator of the middle grade graphic novels Picture Day and Tryouts, the first two books in the Brinkley Yearbooks series. Sarah lives and works in Portland, Maine with her husband and a small menagerie of pets.
Shannon Downey
Shannon Downey
Shannon Downey is the founder of Badass Cross Stitch and Seriously Badass Women, and is an artist, activist, craftivist, community builder, and general instigator. Her book Let's Move the Needle: An Activism Handbook for Artists, Crafters, Creatives, and Makers; Build Community and Make Change! will be released in October, 2024. Her work moves people from passive consumers of art into engaged creators and leverages craft-based art forms to bring people together, present opportunities to transition from makers to change makers, and inspire radical hope for what is possible. Her award-winning work can be found in galleries, museums, and private collections around the world and has been featured in outlets including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Atlas Obscura, Fast Company, and i-D, and books including Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Signs of Resistance: A Visual History of Protest in America. She is on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Sharon De La Cruz
Sharon De La Cruz
Sharon De La Cruz is a multifaceted artist based in New York City, where she intertwines storytelling, education, and activism. Her work dives deep into the nexus of STEM education, artistic expression, and social justice. De La Cruz's journey into comic storytelling propelled her to participate in the Tin House Summer Workshop, leading to the creation of her inaugural graphic novel memoir, I’m a Wild Seed, published by Street Noise in April 2021. This memoir has been praised for its powerful depiction of the evolution of a woman’s queer identity, capturing the blend of fear and joy in embracing one's marginalized identity. Esteemed publications like Kirkus Reviews and Publisher’s Weekly have lauded her narrative style and artistic promise, highlighting her debut's humor and vitality. Beyond her achievements in literature, De La Cruz holds a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (NYU). Her academic and creative endeavors have been recognized and supported through prestigious accolades such as the Fulbright Fellowship, Processing Foundation Fellowship, a TED Residency, and the Red Burns Teaching Fellowship at ITP-NYU for 2021-22. Currently, she contributes to the academic community as an Assistant Arts Professor at ITP-NYU.
Steph Cha
Steph Cha
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Steve Asbell
Steve Asbell
Steve Asbell was diagnosed with autism and draws a comic strip called Stimmy Kitty that shares childhood experiences through an autistic lens. As a member of SCBWI, he was won the Rising Kite Award for illustrations. He lives near Jacksonville, Florida, where he can be found drawing and gardening with his family. You can also find him online at steveasbell.com.
Stuart Kestenbaum
Stuart Kestenbaum
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community.
He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.
He was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.
Tom Booth
Tom Booth
Tom Booth is an author, illustrator, and character designer based in Portland, Maine. He has designed characters for studios like DreamWorks and Supercell, and has written and/or illustrated a number of books, including A Moving Story, Library Books are Not for Eating, and This Is Christmas. Tom grew up outside Philadelphia, but has never missed a summer at Kezar Lake. To see more of Tom’s work, visit: instagram.com/tomwilltell.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last book was Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, while his next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025.
X. Fang
X. Fang
X. Fang is a visual artist and maker of books for young readers. Her picture books include We Are Definitely Human and Dim Sum Palace. She was born in Taiwan, raised in Atlanta, Georgia, bounced around Brooklyn and Philly before settling down in Midcoast Maine
with my husband, son, and dog.
Yao Xiao
Yao Xiao
Yao Xiao is an award-winning author, cartoonist and illustrator. She is a MacDowell Fellow, Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Ignatz Award Nominee, and author of the graphic novel Everything Is Beautiful, And I’m Not Afraid. She is the creator of Baopu, a cartoon column on Autostraddle running in its 10th year, and is a cartoon contributor to The New Yorker. She has spoken about being a queer immigrant at The Stonewall National Museum and Archives, Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles, and Columbia University, and is named 100 Women We Love by GO Magazine. A prolific illustrator for clients such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME Magazine, her work has been supported by Define American, Th!nk Chinatown, the Peter Bullough Foundation, and has received recognition from the Society of Illustrators. Yao Xiao currently teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City where she lives and creates.