...PREVIOUSLY at KETTLE POND

Mary Bonina is the author of My Father’s Eyes: A Memoir, and two collections of poetry—Living Proof  and Clear Eye Tea —all published by Cervena Barva Press. In collaboration with Paul Sayed, she wrote the poems “Grace in the Wind,” the inspiration for his composition of the same title, written for piano, cello, and soprano. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and she has been a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in residence several times since 2002 when she was the finalist for the Goldfarb Family fellowship. She was awarded a VCCA-France residency at Moulin a Nef in Auvillar, France. Bonina is a member and, for more than a decade, served on the Board of Directors of the Writers Room of Boston. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, Mark Pawlak.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. He has also authored four  previous chapbooks, most recently GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein. Chen’s work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.

Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the short story collection The Price of the Haircut, and has won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, and a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His eighth book—the novel I Am Calvin Bledsoe —was published in September 2019. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.

Jaed Coffin  is the author of Roughhouse Friday, a memoir about the year he won the middleweight title of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. He's also the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, which chronicles the summer he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother's village in Thailand. A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, Jaed's essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus, The Sun and many other journals and publications. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters. For more information visit his website here. 

Nicole Counts is an associate editor at One World, an imprint of Random House with the mission of providing a home for authors—novelists, essayists, memoirists, poets, journalists, thinkers and activists—who seek to challenge the status quo. She has worked with Fatimah Asghar, Morgan Parker, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Donovan X. Ramsey, Danielle Geller, Haroon Ullah, Mychal Denzel Smith, Lisa Shannon, Ryan Berg, and others. Nicole Counts started her career in marketing and publicity at PublicAffairs and Nation Books. She is a freelance writer, as well as a facilitator and mentor with Girls Write Now, on the board of Well-Read Black girl, a mentor with Representation Matters Mentorship Program, and a member of POC in publishing. A Jersey native and Philly lover, she lives in Brooklyn. 

Brandon Courtney is a veteran of the United States Navy and the author of This, Sisyphus, Rooms for Rent in the Burning City, The Grief Muscles, and the chapbook, Inadequate Grave. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Colgate University, Juniper Summer Writers’ Institute, and Seaside Writers’ Conference. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Tin House, Boston Review, Guernica, Memorious, The Progressive, and American Literary Review. 

Kerry D'Agostino is a literary agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Bowdoin College, her masters in Art in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her certificate in publishing from the Columbia Journalism School. She started at Curtis Brown in 2011 as assistant to Tim Knowlton and Holly Frederick in the Film and Television Department. After some time as a film and audio rights associate, she also began assisting Peter Ginsberg. In addition to her continued work with Peter, Kerry now represents authors of literary and commercial fiction, and select narrative nonfiction. Above all, she is drawn to work that either introduces her to someone, somewhere, or something new, or makes her see something old in a new way.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of I NEED MUSIC, as well a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion; and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.

Jaclyn Gilbert is a literary agent at Cullen Stanley International and the author of the debut novel Late Air.  Jaclyn received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Yale University. She is the recipient of a research fellowship from the New York Public Library, a contributor to the Bread Loaf, Colgate, and Tin House Writers' Conferences, and her short stories and essays have appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Lit Hub, Long Reads, and elsewhere.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else and the chapbook Pity the Animal. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Catapult in New York and at Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy.    

Mark Pawlak is a poet, editor, and publisher. He is author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies, most recently Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals. His tenth collection will be published in early 2024. Pawlak’s work has been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems and prose have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. His latest publication is the book-length memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov. Pawlak has been a co-editor/publisher of Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose Magazine and Press for 43 years, and is currently managing editor. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Caroline Rayner is a poet and music writer from Richmond, VA. She is the author of THE MOAN WILDS. Her poetry can be found in Annulet, b l u s h, KEITH LLC, Black Warrior Review, Peach Mag, Shabby Doll House, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she taught composition and creative writing. She also served as assistant managing editor of jubilat. Her essays, reviews, and interviews can be found in Tiny Mix Tapes and elsewhere.

David Ryan is the author of the story collection Animals in Motion and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His fiction is forthcoming, or has appeared, in Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Review, Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Electric Literature, No Tokens, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, The Mississippi Review, and elsewhere, and anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. Essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low residency program at New England College.

Raena Shirali is a poet, teaching artist, and editor from Charleston, South Carolina. Shirali is the author of GILT, winner of the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, she is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Shirali’s poems & reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Blackbird, Diode, The Nation, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch, & elsewhere. She recently co-organized We (Too) Are Philly, a summer poetry festival highlighting voices of color, and is currently an organizer for Blue Stoop. She is also a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and a poetry reader for Vinyl.