We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2023 Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence. We received 427 applications this year from across the United States and nine other countries. The task of selecting the writers was difficult, given the breadth of talent and unique voices of the applicants. 46 volunteer readers read the applications which were anonymous. Each application was read by three different readers. 31 finalists were chosen after this process was completed. Five readers reviewed those submissions and selected nine winners. During the month of March, each of these nine residents will spend five days writing at The Mount. These writers will be joined by Regine Jackson, this year’s Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellow, who receives a week’s residency as part of her fellowship.
This writing residency is a collaboration between The Mount and Straw Dog Writers Guild, funded by an anonymous donor who is a SDWG member and the generosity of The Mount.
The 2023 Writers-in-Residence:
CAT WEI is a poet working in healthcare in Brooklyn, New York; she is an active advocate for poetry in her community as the organizer of East Village Poetry Salon, a reading series that centers on female, queer, and trans poets of color. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award, an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow, and Tin House Workshop alumni. Wei’s writing was Best of the Net nominated and appears in Gulf Coast, Vagabond City, Sundog Lit, and Lantern Review.
EMILY ATKINSON is a writer and public defender born and raised in Illinois; she earned her MFA in Playwriting from Smith College and a J.D. and M.A. in English Literature from Boston University. She is currently working on a novel workshopped at the Colgate Writers’ Workshop, two Tin House Summer Workshops, and a Tin House Winter Workshop. Atkinson’s published work appears in Electric Literature, PopMatters, and HuffPost. She lives in western Massachusetts with her dog, Marlowe.
EMILY KIERNAN is the author of the novel, Great Divide (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Pank, The Collagist, Redivider, Quarterly West, X-R-A-Y, and numerous other journals. She has received support from MacDowell, The Ucross Foundation, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Tin House Summer Workshop, and The Community of Writers. She holds an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts and serves as a prose editor at Noemi Press.
KATHERINE EASER was born in Kansas City, Kansas, the daughter of a Chinese mother from Taiwan and an American father of European ancestry. After earning a BA from Smith College, she studied creative writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. In 2011, her young adult novel, Vicious Little Darlings, was published by Bloomsbury. Her short story, “Parade of Cats,” a third-place winner in Glimmer Train’s 2017 Fiction Open, appeared in the magazine’s Winter 2018 issue. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.
KEEONNA HARRIS is a writer, storyteller, mother of five, and prison abolitionist. She received her Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Her dissertation, “Everybody Survived but Nobody Survived: Black Feminism, Motherhood, and Mass Incarceration,” used ethnography and autoethnography to document the experiences of Black mothers navigating the process of visitation and incarceration. Her memoir, Mainline Mama, forthcoming in 2024 from Amistad Press, draws from her experiences as a Black woman, a teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner, building community in the borderlands of the prison. An excerpt from her memoir is available on Salon.com.
LINDSAY ROCKWELL is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She’s published, or forthcoming in, BlazeVOX, Connecticut River Review, Amethyst Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Willawaw, among others. Her first collection of poems, GHOST FIRES, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag press in spring/summer 2023. She won first prize in the October Project Poetry Contest and 81st Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Lindsay holds a Master of Dance and Choreography from NYU’s Tisch School of Arts and is an oncologist.
MARIO GIANNONE received a Bachelor’s in English with a minor in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Giannone served as an assistant fiction editor for Epoch Magazine and taught creative writing and composition for Cornell University’s Department of Literatures in English and the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He teaches writing for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. Giannone’s short fiction appears in Third Coast, Indiana Review, and Blue Mesa Review, and his story “Heaven is a Disk,” published in Indiana Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
MARTHA PHAM is a writer from Massachusetts. A 2022 Tin House Scholar, she holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an incoming writer-in-residence at the The Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Residency Program and soon after the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts where she will tend to a novel-in-progress. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Nurture, Serious Eats and elsewhere. Find her at marthapham.com
PARVATI RAMCHANDANI is a recently retired physician looking forward to bringing long-stalled writing projects to fruition. She has published short fiction and creative nonfiction pieces in literary magazines, including Peregrine, Asian Pacific American Journal, and Bucks County Writer. Ramchandani won an award from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts for fiction writing. Two of her creative nonfiction pieces relating to her work as a physician are slated for publication in an anthology of writings by Women Physicians titled This Side of Doctoring (Eliza Chin, MD, and Anju Goel, Eds.), to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.