Mountain Words
Writers-in-Residence
2024 Writers-in-Residence
From left Phil Coleman, Amanda Rizkalla, Anna Claire, Charlie Sorrenson, Okwudili Nebeolisa
Okwudili Nebeolisa
Okwudili Nebeolisa is the author of Terminal Maladies, (Autumn House Press, 2024), selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggett Prize for Fiction.
His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Cincinnati Review, Image, The New England Review, POETRY, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. His fiction is forthcoming in Evergreen Review, while his nonfiction has appeared in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Minnesota where he is the recipient of a Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. He is a recipient of support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Granum Foundation. He is currently a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine.
Amanda Rizkalla
Amanda Rizkalla is a 2023-24 Steinbeck Fellow at San José State University. Last year, she was the 2022-23 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Boston Review, No Tokens Journal, The Fabulist, and elsewhere. A graduate of Stanford University, she has been awarded a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and residencies from Blue Mountain Center, Monson Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Djerassi, and Hedgebrook. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the Kemper K. Knapp Graduate Fellowship.
Phil Coleman
Phil Coleman writes speculative fiction and adventure novels for younger audiences. His works include The Quickborn Odyssey and The Quickwild Odyssey for upper middle grade readers, and Riddled Worlds, When James Fell, and Lockspell for young adults. His books and stories are all about taking an idea and then pushing it far beyond the bounds of our own reality. In addition to independently publishing through In Otherworlds Books he has now joined the Western Colorado University genre fiction program in pursuit of his MFA. With a love of the mountains, he has been a member of the Crested Butte community since 2011. He is currently working on a steampunk fantasy trilogy intersecting, magic, science, and resilient kids.
Charlie Sorrenson
Charlie Sorrenson is a queer, trans writer who grew up in Indiana and New Zealand. A third-year fiction candidate at UC Irvine, he was a 2023 Lambda Scholar and a finalist for the 2023 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. His work is published or forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review and Apogee, among other publications, and he is a proud alum of the Tin House and Clarion Writers’ Workshops.
Anna Claire
Anna Claire Fenerty was born on a futon and raised in the mountains of Colorado’s western slope. She moved to India when she was sixteen, sparking a wanderlust that has yet to dull. She has been a nanny, a home health aide, barista, gardener, and a cannabis harvester. She is an innkeeper, and a local politician. She has explored the foothills of the Himalayas, trespassed rain-soaked Irish cemeteries, and crisscrossed the United States in a Subaru called Roadrunner. She writes poetry and plays and paints. When she’s not writing, she can be found wandering high alpine landscapes or watching the people pass by on a bench in the sun.
2023 Writers-in-Residence
From left Alessandra Bautze, Claire Boyles, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Jenny Qi, Molly Murfee
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of the memoir, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, the essay collection, Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life, and his newest book, Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between. He is the recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose, the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize, the Colorado Book Award, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze Medal, a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Memoir selection, and a "Top Ten Latinx Author of 2017" designation by Latino Stories. He also has been a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, the National Magazine Award, and the Breadloaf Bakeless Literary Prize.
His work has appeared in such venues as New Letters, TriQuarterly, Puerto del Sol, Best of Brevity, Best of Pilgrimage, Brief Encounters, The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. His other honors include the New Letters Literary Award, High Desert Journal Obsidian Prize, Sonora Review Essay Award, Juxtaprose Nonfiction Award, Pushcart Prize Special Mention, Best American Essays Notable selection, and residency fellowships from the Arizona Poetry Center, Vermont Studio Center, PlatteForum, and Art 342.
A native of Albuquerque's North Valley, he is a former columnist, feature writer, and beat reporter at newspapers throughout the West. He teaches in the MFA Writing Programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Colorado State University.
Jenny Qi
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, selected by Dustin Pearson for the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She has received support from organizations such as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working on more essays and poems in conversation with this work.
Claire Boyles
Claire Boyles (she/her) is a writer and former farmer who lives in Colorado. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Site Fidelity, which won the High Plains Book Award for short story collections and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Reading the West Award. She has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation, the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Community of Writers. She has been a Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop and teaches in Eastern Oregon University’s low-residency MFA program in Creative and Environmental Writing. www.claireboyleswrites.com.
Alessandra Bautze
Alessandra Bautze is Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at Georgia State University. She holds an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from The University of Texas at Austin, as well as a B.A. in The Writing Seminars and Film & Media Studies from The Johns Hopkins University. Her work seeks to reflect the diversity of the American experience while also embracing a socially-conscious, realist approach to narrative. Her screenplay RACING THE WOLF GOD won Best Screenplay at the 2021 Anchorage International Film Festival. Set in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of Alaska, this drama follows a 26-year-old Yup’ik woman and former champion musher who, after ten years in prison, faces the challenges of re-entry as she finds herself back in the world of dogsled racing—the exact activity that led to her incarceration in the first place. In addition to her work as a writer, Alessandra also works as a script consultant, most recently for SignWorld Studios, a Deaf-owned production company focusing on producing authentic media in American Sign Language and English. In November 2021, she was one of six writers selected to participate in the 2021 Nanjing International Writers’ Residency Program, where she participated in a virtual cultural exchange with Chinese writers. In July 2022, she returned to Alaska to participate in the Storyknife Writers Residency Program for women writers in Homer, Alaska. She believes in the power of language to connect communities.
2023 Local Writer-in-Residence
Molly Murfee
Creative non-fiction and place-based author Molly Murfee has studied, written, and taught nature writing, ecofeminism, mythology, creative writing, and indigenous culture and history for over three decades. She is the author of the Earth Muffin Memos blog featured in the Crested Butte News and online, focused on fostering environmental and social change. Her over 500 published articles have appeared throughout local venues, as well as nationally in outlets such as Mountain Journal, the Mountain Gazette, and Powder Magazine. Writing publicly for and in this community for over 20 years, Molly is the former feature writer and editor of the Crested Butte Weekly and can now be regularly found in the Crested Butte Magazine. She holds Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in literature, creative writing, and environmental writing; and has served as faculty teaching the same with Colorado College, Colorado State University, and the Audubon Expedition Institute at Lesley University. Molly currently teaches expedition-based nature writing and environmental ethics courses with the Clark Family School of Environment & Sustainability at Western Colorado University. Additionally a field educator and wilderness guide, her writing workshops connect people to place through immersions in nature. As a creative activist, she co-directs the Autumn Equinox celebration, Vinotok, generating earth-honoring and community-building practices through storytelling, mythmaking, public art, and street theatre.
Her recognitions include: finalist for the 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction; contributor to the 2022 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference; Career Advancement Award from the Colorado Creative Industries; an Artistic Enrichment Grant from the Crested Butte Arts Festival; and Red Lady # 30 for High Country Conservation Advocates, among other honors. Molly’s book in progress, The Adventure of Home, is a creative nonfiction book re-membering our indigeneity to this Earth through braided lyrical narratives unravelling patriarchy, capitalism, Christianity and colonialism, and reweaving mythologies of a sacred wild.
2022 Writers-in-Residence
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, was published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine.
In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize.
Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX.
Dominque Demetrea Conway
Dominque Demetrea Conway is a Baltimore-based activist and author who writes non-fiction that embodies her lived experience as a person of African descent in the United States, and a resident of West Baltimore. Born in Evanston, Illinois, and raised in the nation’s rustbelt, she is the mother of four adult children.
As an activist, Dominque has engaged in work addressing mass incarceration and political imprisonment in the United States. Her work with men in prisons resulted in the creation of Friend of a Friend, a prison-based mentoring program designed to teach critical thinking skills to young prisoners.
Dominque has a BA from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and received an MFA from Goucher College in Baltimore in May 2021; she will pursue a Ph.D. in English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas beginning in the Fall of 2022. She is the co-author of Marshall Law The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, the memoir of Black Panther political prisoner, Eddie Conway. Her current project, Far From The Tree is a genealogical memoir examining the impact of racism and trauma on consecutive generations of her family spanning three centuries in America.
Megha Nayar
Megha Nayar is a communications coach from/in Ahmedabad, India. She spends half her time training corporate professionals in French, English, and Soft Skills, and the other half writing short stories to deconstruct the complicated experience of womanhood in modern India. She lives with her parents, grand-parents, and an eccentric little pug.
Since 2019, Megha’s stories have appeared in 40+ literary magazines, among them Macromic, Trampset, Bending Genres, Out of Print, Gulmohur Quarterly, and Bengaluru Review. She was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020 – her story “Don’t Stay” made it to the top 200 out of 5,100 entries.
In 2021, Megha was selected for the inaugural cohort of Write Beyond Borders – a British Council-funded project offering masterclasses and mentorship to 10 upcoming South Asian writers. Megha was tutored by London-based author Amita Murray. She is now coming to Crested Butte armed with a blueprint for her first book.
When she’s not teaching her students new words, Megha is busy learning some. She is a student of Spanish – entirely self-taught. She plans to earn a DELE B2 Diploma by 2023 and add a third language to her repertoire. She is also a trained garba dancer and a keen solo traveler. Having spent three life-altering months in a Himalayan hamlet last year, she hopes to become a permanent mountain-dweller someday.
Twitter: @meghasnatter
Bernardo Wade
Bernardo Wade is a writer/artist from New Orleans, who tries at poems and rides his bike around Bloomington, IN. Indiana University funds his present period of studying with others.
Bernardo currently serves as Associate Editor of the Indiana Review, is a Watering Hole Fellow, and moonlights as an equity and justice advocate. He was recently awarded the 2021 Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize and has words in, or forthcoming in, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Cincinnati Review & others.
2022 Local Writer in Residence
Stephanie Maltarich
Stephanie Maltarich is an independent audio producer and writer who has lived in the Gunnison Valley for a decade. She took a two year hiatus to attend graduate school in Missoula, Montana, where she earned a masters degree in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing. In her final semester, she enrolled in an audio journalism class, and from that moment -- she knew producing audio stories of all types would be in her future.
Since graduating in 2020, Stephanie has produced a wide range of stories that focus on the environment, the outdoors, and social justice. Her work has aired on NPR, Colorado Public Radio, Yellowstone Public Radio and Alaska Public Media. Last summer, she spent two months in rural Alaska reporting on the Bristol Bay salmon fishery. Beyond radio, she loves producing podcasts. Her work can be heard on The Dirtbag Diaries, Out There Podcast, The Freeflow Podcast, and Climate One Podcast.
She also writes! This year, she's published two stories that brought Gunnison Valley stories to state-wide news in The Colorado Sun. Her other work has appeared in a smattering of other publications.
Stephanie will spend her residency producing five radio-feature stories titled Headwaters for KBUT Community Radio. The project, funded by The Water Desk, will dive into the important stories that make up our valley's important role as a headwaters community to the Colorado River Basi
2021 (inaugural) Writer in Residence Cohort
2021 Resident Writers - First Cohort
Chelsey Johnson, Adam Valen Levinson, Chris La Tray, and Lee Anderson arrived in Crested Butte May 1, 2021 to kick off their residency.
“I will never forget my time as a Mountain Words Writer in Residence, both for my writing productivity as well as the welcome I received from the local arts community. The experience was everything I expected and then totally unexpected as well. Who knew it would come to feel like home, and the other writers like family? The town of Crested Butte brims with great characters and I can't even begin to name them all; I'm already aching to return and visit them again. My month was life-changing in every way and I didn't want to leave.”
— Chris La Tray
“The Mountain Words Writer-in-Residence program was my very first residency, and it's set the bar for every future experience I have. From the moment I set foot in Crested Butte, I felt welcomed by the thriving literary community in the small town, embraced by both the natural beauty and the people. I luxuriated in my time here, allowing myself the grace to finally accomplish the hardest work in writing (thinking), and found myself inspired and motivated even beyond the end of the residency. The friends I've made here are life-long, and the experience has helped me to feel both replenished in a post-pandemic world and like I can actually achieve my goals as a writer with a community who has my back.”
— Lee Anderson
Chris La Tray
Chris La Tray is a Métis writer and storyteller. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large (2018, Riverfeet Press) won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His next book, Becoming Little Shell, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2022. Chris is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and lives near Missoula, Montana.
Chelsey Johnson
Chelsey Johnson’s debut novel Stray City came out with Custom House/HarperCollins in 2018, and her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, and NPR's Selected Shorts, among others. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. Born and raised in rural northern Minnesota, she now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she is an associate professor of fiction at Northern Arizona University’s MFA and undergraduate programs. A second novel is in the works.
Lee Anderson
Lee Anderson is a nonbinary MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, where they are the Managing Editor of Thin Air Magazine. They have been published sporadically but with zest, with work appearing or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Unstamatic Magazine, and more.
2021 Visiting Author
Adam Valen Levinson
Adam Valen Levinson is the author of the "nonfiction novel" The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah (W. W. Norton, 2017) — dubbed "Eat, Pray, Laugh" by The New York Times but/and not without its controversy. National Book Critics Circle award winner for poetry Morgan Parker called him "an incredibly generous, compassionate, and thorough writer who gorgeously blends lyricism with reportage and philosophy with confession." Adam has written, filmed, and photographed for Al Jazeera, The Paris Review, Haaretz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and VICE, and done college stints at the Meccas of real fake news: The Colbert Report and The Onion. He has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College and an MPhil in Sociology from Yale University, where he is a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology. All of his stories are true.
Enormous thanks to Kathy & Michael Keig, Jeannette & John Williams, Blake Hawk and Jim Watson for generously donating housing for our Writers-in-Residence.