Residencies

A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. She was a 2025 NEA fellow in poetry. A.D. Lauren-Abunassar will be working on a hybrid lyric poetry manuscript, “In Dreams I am Always a Horse,” which is a study of diasporic identity-making, retelling the immigration of Lauren-Abunassar’s family from Palestine to the U.S. With poems spanning a wide range of forms— including embedded video and sound poems, textual maps, and self-erasures— the project will grapple with notions of inheritance and how one must grapple constantly with history lost and preserved. How is meaning made, identity forged, often in the aftermath of violence or journeys that have been forced by the reach of colonial violence? How might dream and archive serve as forms of ancestral wellness practice? These questions are at the heart of “In Dreams I am Always a Horse,” as is the question of how storytelling might function as a way to resist erasure.

Afabwaje Kurian is the author of the novel BEFORE THE MANGO RIPENS, which was a finalist for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2025 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and was also longlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Afabwaje received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Callaloo, The Bare Life Review, Joyland Magazine, and other publications. She has served as visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and taught fiction at the University of Iowa and for the International Writing Program. While at MWC, Afabwaje will be working on a novel about a woman who flees from Nigeria to America to escape a short-lived polygamous past and her involvement in the murder of her co-wife. The novel will explore the woman’s regrets as she struggles to come to terms with her responsibility in the murder and her complicated past. Afabwaje hopes to experiment with structure and point of view.

Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024). Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2025) and an excerpt from her new poetry manuscript was featured as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week. Cassidy was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, and now lives in Toronto. She was the 2024-2025 Writer-in-Residence at Sheridan College and is the 2025-2026 Poet-in-Residence at Arc Poetry Magazine.

Calley Marotta is a former K-12 special educator and current college professor. She teaches writing courses on topics ranging from disability to fashion. Her research and creative writing focus on literacy in the lives of essential workers including parents. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Maine Review, Mutha Magazine, and Atticus Review. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled Blame The Mother.  Blame the Mother follows a new writing professor and mother who is grappling with her young daughter’s rejection and the resulting shame when her child overattaches to her father. The book moves across time and genre speculating what caused the child’s rejection while interweaving feminist and disability justice research about attachment, care work, parenting culture, and institutions of motherhood. In separate chapters, the narrator uses speculative nonfiction to seek comfort through real figures that are not available to her in her real life. As the story unfolds and blame becomes less clear, the narrator’s husband, the father who is upheld as the obvious good parent, turns out to have a role to play in the family’s problems. But throughout the book, the question remains, will the mother find a way to make her daughter love her? Blame the Mother is an exploration of and challenge to a culture bent on blaming mothers for society’s ills and a call to reimagine mothering outside of maternal primacy.

Farheen Raparthi is a writer and artist based in Virginia. She holds an MFA in fiction from George Mason University, where she was awarded a Thesis Fellowship. Her writing has received support from Ragdale and has been published in The Georgia Review. She is currently at work on a novel.

Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee lives in Truckee, CA.

Jason is a Bay Area writer whose work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and won the 2024 PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers. He has been awarded a McCormack Writing Center Residency, participated in the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and was a semifinalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize. Jason currently works in Medicare marketing with hopes of reducing the amount of paperwork beneficiaries receive and is writing a novel-in-stories about an absurd journey through recovery.

Joheun (Jo) Lee (she/her) is a Korean-to-English literary translator and writer from South Korea. With roots in K-pop fandom, she is drawn to stories of desire, relationships, and identity, particularly by women and queer writers. Her translations include Lee Heejoo’s Holy Boy (Picador/HarperVia, 2026) and Amil’s The Forest Called You (Harvill Secker, 2026). Her translation of Lee Yuri's short story “The End of the World” appeared in The Exchanges, and she holds multiple LTI Korea and KPIPA sample translation grants. She will begin her Master’s in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2026. Jo lives with her partner and four cats in Shanghai, China. Cloud People by Lee Yuri (Munhakdongne, 2026) is a speculative novel set on a toxic pink cloud hovering above a wealthy Korean city. It is a vertical slum whose residents face forced demolition by a government-mandated "rainmaking ritual." The novel is narrated by Haneul, a twenty-year-old woman whose name means "sky," bitterly ironic for someone who cannot escape. Haneul works at a BBQ restaurant, gnawing leftover rib bones in the back while customers leave food untouched. Her father works construction, her mother cleans three houses a day, her grandfather's lungs are turning fibrous from the cloud itself, and her brother is still too young to work. The family holds together not out of love but necessity, each knowing they'll need the same mercy when their own turn comes. As the ritual approaches, Haneul loses her family one by one: to escape, prison, illness, and a desperate act on a livestream. Lee Yuri draws on Korea's tradition of romanticizing poverty—notably naming hilltop slums "moon neighborhoods" for their extreme elevation—and digs into the rot beneath. The pink cloud that looks like cotton candy turns out to be poison that destroys a family.

Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. She also worked as a research assistant on the book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly. Her fiction can be found in places that include Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), Terrain as winner of the 2024 Editor’s Prize, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America and The Best Small Fictions 2019. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches in Milwaukee and is represented by Stephanie Delman at Trellis Literary Management. For film/TV, she is represented by Hilary Zaitz Michael at WME. Gold Chain is about love and theft. These stories catch women who steal: gold necklaces, Pez Dispensers, nail polish, pens, grapes, memories, love, time. These stories spin obsessively around questions of womanhood, addiction, capitalism, and modern-day feminine survival, ultimately asking if our desires as women are even our own.

Liana Fu 傅嘉恩 is a queer writer and zinemaker from Chicago. As an interdisciplinary artist inspired by the Cantonese diasporic archive, she plays with photography, collage, and printmaking to explore intimacy, process, and nostalgia. Her writing is supported by Lambda Literary, Tin House, and the Illinois Arts Council. Her current project, Blueprint of a Burning House, was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize, shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize, and awarded by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. You can find her work in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Margins, Hyphen Magazine, Glass Poetry, and elsewhere.

Michelle Zhou is a fiction writer based in the United States. She writes literary speculative fiction in English, her second language, having come to the form through Edgar Allan Poe at sixteen. Her debut novel, The Canvas Radius, traces a hereditary compulsion across three generations of Victorian and contemporary London. She works in quantitative finance and writes in the margins of that life — until now. The Canvas Radius is a literary speculative novel by Michelle Zhou spanning three generations of a family marked by an involuntary sensitivity to wrongness — the inability to leave a crooked painting, a misaligned threshold, an error in a room's logic uncorrected. The novel traces this compulsion from Victorian London, where painter Thomas Mellor spends twenty-four years circling an alley before crossing into a city built entirely from paint, to the present day, where his descendant Elias Moore enters the same city and begins to learn its rules. The city operates on a precise mechanism: each deliberate correction transfers paint to the hands at a measurable rate, accumulating toward a threshold from which no one returns intact. Inside, Elias navigates a population of people at different stages of absorption. Outside, his partner Kelly follows the trail of Elias's family line backward through three generations, finding every threshold the city offers but remaining outside. The novel is structured in three stages — the city as puzzle, the city as world, the city as mirror — and moves between Elias's interior and Kelly's parallel search with the precision of a system designed to hold two people permanently apart. It ends without reunion.

Simone Zapata is a poet, editor, and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her writing can be found in Beloit Poetry Journal, Foglifter, Dilettante Army, and Brink Literary Journal, where she served as the inaugural Emerging Writer Fellow in Hybrid Writing. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, Banff Centre, Community of Writers, and Miami Book Fair. She holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and organizes with the SF/Bay Area chapter of the Editorial Freelancers Association. Voices Under Water is a hybrid poetry manuscript that centers the speaker’s aunt, who had schizophrenia and died suddenly of colon cancer in 2018. Incorporating medical records, interviews, divination, and printmaking, the project traces the speaker’s efforts to reconcile her identity in the wake of familial rupture. As the manuscript unfolds, the speaker develops a series of large-scale block prints adapted from her aunt’s final CT scans, which evidenced that the cancer had metastasized beyond the possibility of treatment. By inhabiting shifting frames of reference, Voices Under Water troubles the boundary between self and other in its attempts to reckon with an absence that resists dis/closure.

Victoria Newton Ford is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing explores fungibility, violence, haunting, and intimacy. She has received support from Crosstown Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, and more. Victoria is an inaugural 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow, administered by Haymarket Books. She is currently working on her first manuscript and documentary, which examine slavery as an ever-present haunting in the lives of Black mothers and their children. While at MWC, Victoria will work on poems and essays exploring her family’s connection to a 19th century abolitionist plantation in Memphis, known as Nashoba. This manuscript maps the narrative of her mother's captivity onto a longer, recursive narrative of Blackness, sexual violence, and Southern haunting that has never fully ended.