Thank you to all the accomplished writers for applying for the Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence program at The Mount. The Selection Committee is pleased to announce the residents:
Camila Sanmiguel Anaya
Eleanor Fuller
Jason Prokowiew
Jenn Alandy Trahan
Julia Thacker
Mariah Rigg
Mistinguette Smith
Stevie Billow
Whitney Scharer
2024 Residents’ Biographies
Camila Sanmiguel Anaya is a Mexican-American poet born and raised on the southern border. She graduated from Harvard University in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts in History & Literature, taking workshops with Jorie Graham and Josh Bell. Sanmiguel Anaya was the 2017 National Student Poet for the Southwest—one of five students receiving the highest honor in the country for youth poets—and worked with young refugees and advocates for immigrant children as part of her service. She won second place in the 2023 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. She is an alumna of Harvard’s Signet Society, an artists’ society.
Eleanor Fuller recently completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to volunteer as a fiction reader on the editorial board at Prism International. She is the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and a finalist in The Fiddlehead’s 2023 fiction contest. Her stories appear in The Moth, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. Fuller’s work has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto.
Jason Prokowiew is a 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant winner for Literary Oral History for his braided memoir War Boys. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. His writing has appeared in Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, and on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, Monson Arts, and the Mass Cultural Council. He runs his law office dedicated to disability advocacy and lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband.
Jenn Alandy Trahan is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and where she currently teaches fiction, creative expression, and contemporary American short stories. Published in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories, Jenn’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation as well as by writing residencies in Laugarvatn and Las Vegas, through Gullkistan, The Writer’s Block, and Plympton, respectively. She lives in California with her spouse, daughter, and two dogs.
Julia Thacker’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and The New Republic. Twice a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th-anniversary issue of Poetry International. Her collection, All the Flowers Are for Me, was a finalist in the 2023 National Poetry Series. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. Her work has been published in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Catapult, and elsewhere, and has received support from MASS MoCA, the Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Mariah’s prose chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle was published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press in 2023. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Writing about race, land, and kinship is Mistinguette Smith’s purpose and joy. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pluck!, Abandon Journal, the Black LGBT anthologies Does Your Mama Know, and Other Countries: Voices Rising. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories about the lives of one Black family during the uprisings for Civil Rights/Black Power, a love letter from the movements for racial justice in the mid-1960s to those of today. You can find her writing in Oberlin, Ohio, or at MistinguetteSmith.com.
Stevie Billow (they/them) is a writer, educator, and creative organizer originally from rural Vermont. They hold a BA from Smith College and an MAT from the Universidad de Alcalá. Stevie is a 2023-2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at GrubStreet and the founder of Rotary Arts, an interdisciplinary arts collective for and by emerging LGBTQ+ creatives. Stevie’s writing has appeared in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Fauxmoir, The Blood Pudding, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, and elsewhere. You can find Stevie on Instagram @wollibs and at steviebillow.com.
Whitney Scharer is the author of The Age of Light, a national bestseller named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour, Real Simple, Booklist, and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and was published in over a dozen countries. Whitney is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship and has been awarded residencies at VCCA and Ragdale. She lives with her family in Arlington, MA, where she is working on her second novel.