Meet our 2026 Anne LaBastille Residents

Joe Connelly’s first novel Bringing Out the Dead, was based on his ten years as a paramedic in NYC, and was adapted by Martin Scorsese for the film of the same name. He now lives full time in the Adirondacks, working as a paramedic and ski patroller and sometimes journalist. As an EMS Director and paramedic for multiple agencies he’s seen first hand the struggles of first responders in rural areas. He’s currently working on a novel about North Country responders and their unique role in holding these small communities upright.

Hannah Perrin King is the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Eleventh Annual Poetry Contest and the winner of The Georgia Review’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, as well as the winner of New Millennium Writings’ Award for Poetry and AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry. Recently, she became a winner of The Poetry Society’s 2024 National Poetry Competition for her poem “Inheritance,” chosen from over 20,000 entries, which was anthologized. In 2026, a poem of King’s was highly commended by Ishion Hutchinson for the 2026 Moth Poetry Prize, “one of the most prestigious for unpublished poems,” as featured in The Irish Times. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Best New Poets, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as Best of the Net. In 2022-23, King was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA) where she was the inaugural Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow, a scholarship awarded in addition to the fellowship to “an emerging woman writer of exceptional promise.” She has received additional support from Tin House, MASS MoCA, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, and the Ucross Foundation, among others, and her first manuscript is a National Poetry Series finalist. She lives and works in Massachusetts. More can be found at www.hannahperrinking.com.

Hall works as an Associate Professor and Director of First Year Writing at the City University of New York, where she also studies the effects of early childhood trauma on literacy learning. 

Hai-Dang Phan was born in Vietnam and raised in Wisconsin. He is the author of the poetry collection Reenactments (Sarabande, 2019). His poems have appeared in New England Review, The NewYorker, Poetry, and his essays in The Baffler, Three Sisters Literary and Mekong Review. He is writing an environmental memoir about his travels through Vietnam in search of birds and his family’s past. He currently teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa City. 

Unity Powell is a Cleveland-based fiction writer, visual artist , and journalist whose work lives at the intersection of history, interiority of life. Her short story “The Wait” was published by Midnight & Indigo in 2025, and her journalism appears in Signal Cleveland and The Land. She is a 2022 Root. Wounds. Words. Fellow, the current Cleveland Arts Prize Verge Fellowship recipient in literature, and writer-director of an original play that premiered at the 2024 BorderLight International Theatre Festival. She curates and hosts Tell It, a community storytelling series centering everyday voices.

Mike Rosen (he/him) is a queer, jewish mental health counselor with episodic disability. His clinical work focuses on the intersection of masculinity, nature, and relationships. He is the winner of the 2024 TulipTree Short Story Prize which earned him a Pushcart nomination, and his writing has appeared in Upworthy, The Chronogram, and Button Poetry. He has performed on three continents, and videos of his performances have been viewed over one million times.

Hafsa Zulfiqar is a poet, editor, literary critic, and psychology researcher from Sindh, Pakistan. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Cornell University, and earned her BA in Literature and Psychology from Bennington College. Her creative work which has received three Best of the Net, a Pushcart nomination, and the support of grants, fellowships, and residencies from We Need Diverse Books, Brooklyn Poets, and The Mount and Straw Dog Writers can be found or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Pleiades, swamp pink, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, The Margins, Poetry Wales, Lunch Ticket, Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, The Maine Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Kitchen Table Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, DIALOGIST, Figure 1, & elsewhere. Her research has been supported by a Mellon Foundation fellowship and she has co-authored psychology papers published in scientific journals such as the American Journal of Community Psychology and Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. She is also the co-author of a book chapter on adolescent mental health published in The encyclopedia of mental health, 3rd edition (Elsevier). Currently, she serves as a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and as an assistant editor for EPOCH.