HOSTED BY founder and director of MVWR, JUSTEN AHREN.
Ahren is currently the West Tisbury Poet Laureate,
co-director of the Pathways / Featherstone Summer Festival of Poetry,
and founder of a writing workshop in Labro, Italy.
With readings by:
Sandra Burch … is a poet whose work has appeared in The Torrid Journal, Firehouse Journal and Patience and Grace, to name a few. Her poem No More Fears won an Editor’s Choice Award for Outstanding Achievement In Poetry and was published in Collected Whispers. Sandra lives in Donalsonville, Georgia and is our first Georgian at Noepe.
Heather Hiett …from Oakland California, is attending her first residency. Heather is working on a memoir about her work as a photographer and surfer. For over 15 years Heather photographed and documented female surfers from Hawaii to France to Brazil. Since her Peace Corps stint in Yemen and Tunisia where she taught English as a second language, Heather has worked in marketing, PR contracting, and as a freelance photographer.
Diane Cameron … is a columnist for the Albany Times Union. Writer, teacher, spiritual director, Diane has published two books, Looking for Signs and Out of the Woods. In addition to her residency at Noepe, Diane has also spent time at Millay Colony. Her current project is both memoir and investigative journalism exploring the trauma of war, and how language impacts and changes our understanding of trauma and mental illness. An excerpt of this manuscript was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Denise Ornstein … is the author of three novels: The Secret Twin, Unseen Companion, and When the Wind Blows Hard. In addition to directing the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University, Denise has taught in 14 Alaskan bush villages, run an orphanage for Native American children and been a mentor in the Pen-Faulkner Prison Writing Program. She is working on a new novel about female inmates training service dogs.
Colin Brezicki … is an award-winning Canadian writer. His work has won several recent literary awards including Literal Latte’s Fiction Award, Bosque (the magazine) Short Fiction Contest and the J.K. Galbraith Literary Award in 2014 alone. Colin is working on the novel Calleigh’s Remains which he began last year while in residence at Noepe.
Pauline West … is the recipient of Noepe’s Carol Marie Smith Memorial Scholarship for 2015. Pauline writes for the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina. She keeps a daily journal about an artist’s life, excerpts of which can be read at pauline-west.com. Her novel, Evening’s Land won the 2015 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Award.
Michael Callahan … is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Elle magazines. His first novel, Searching for Grace Kelly was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His new work, a work of historical fiction, set in 1949 Atlantic City, is entitled, The Night She Won Miss America. It is a story inspired by Bette Cooper who after winning the title of Miss America, promptly ran off with her escort on a road trip west and gets more than she bargained for.