We’re excited to announce the selected writers for this year’s Anne LaBastille Writers Residency. The Anne LaBastille Writers Residency provides space, time and an inspiring landscape for regional and non-local writers to work on their writing projects, a chance to unplug and connect with other writers, and to tap into their creative self. The residency was generously provided by the estate of Anne LaBastille. This year welcomed 108 applications from talented writers all over the globe. This year’s awarded writers include Madeline Hennessey (Poetry), Noah Stetzer (Poetry), Betsy Kepes (Fiction), Liz Wyckoff (Fiction), Glenn Sandiford (Non-fiction), and Caitlin Chandler (Non-fiction). More about each writer below.
Three spaces went to local writers living in the Adirondack region. Resident writers will have a public reading during their two-week residency on Saturday October 14 at 2pm. Contact the Adirondack Center for Writing for directions to Twitchell Lodge at info@adirondackcenterforwriting.org.
About the 2017 Anne LaBastille Resident Writers:
Poetry
Madeline Hennessey grew up in Northeastern Connecticut, majored in English at Skidmore College, and received her MFA in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. During and after college she traveled to Europe, the United Kingdom, and China, to study, explore, and teach. She’s lived full-time in the Adirondacks for three and a half years now, and during that time was able to complete her low-residency MFA and published her first book of poetry, Body of Water, with Ra Press.
Noah Stetzer is an associate editor at Bull City Press in Durham, NC. In 2016, his poetry book, Because I Can See Needing a Knife, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. He was a finalist for the Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award and the 1st Annual Tinderbox Poetry Contest. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has won both the 2015 Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry and the 39th New Millennium Award for Poetry. Noah’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Green Mountains Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. He is a scholarship recipient from the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers and from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Born & raised in Pittsburgh PA, Noah now lives in the Washington DC area and can be found online at http://www.noahstetzer.com.
Fiction
Betsy Kepes lives in St. Lawrence County and currently works as a piano teacher and a freelance writer. For many years she has contributed commentaries, book reviews and special projects to North Country Public Radio. She also writes “The Book Explorer”, a column in The Adirondack Explorer magazine. In the summers she travels to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho to work as a wilderness trail contractor and a fire lookout.
Liz Wyckoff was born and raised in Northern New York, and she has an MFA from Oregon State University. Her short fiction has been published in Copper Nickel, The Collagist, and Quarterly West, among other journals, and she recently received the 2016 Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Her profiles, reviews, and interviews have appeared online at Tin House, the Rumpus, and Electric Literature. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is an editor at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Non-fiction
Glenn Sandiford is currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, CO. A native of England, he came to America three decades ago to study for a dual Master’s degree in Forest Resources Management & Communications at SUNY ESF. He then worked for the Glens Falls Post-Star as an environment reporter in the Adirondacks during 1989-91. His coverage of a land-use planning ‘war’ there won a major Associated Press award. Seeking to better understand the controversy and its socio-historical roots, he left journalism to begin an environmental biography of an old-time Adirondack guide.
Caitlin Chandler is an American freelance journalist and creative nonfiction writer who has worked abroad for several years. In June 2016 she stood on the border of a demilitarized zone between Jordan and Syria known as “the berm” and witnessed Jordan’s refusal to allow 75,000 Syrian refugees to cross an arbitrary sandbank in the name of national security. The people she interviewed, mostly women, had fled their homes because of aerial bombardment or ISIL. Outside of Jordan, the world hardly cared, as is the case with so many instances of mass displacement and large-scale violence in her lifetime. Over the past ten years, she’s committed to her work in global health and human rights advocacy.