Vermont Studio Center

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and was a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will have its world premiere in 2026. She has two books: her essay collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press and her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, was released with Pantheon in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in New York City. Her debut, mother (Penguin Books) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

msredcherries.com

Author photo courtesy of Barb Danielson

The 2025 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores connections between translation and migration. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, EcoTheo Review, Two Lines, Chimurenga, and more. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, Bard College, and Bucknell University. She received an M.Phil in Comparative Literature from New York University and worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative, where she served most recently as the Assistant Dean of the Microcolleges.

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Caroline M. Mar is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Water Guest, the Editors’ Selection for the 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series. She is also the author of Special Education (Texas Review Press), which won the 2019 X. J. Kennedy Prize, and the chapbook Dream of the Lake (Bull City Press). Carrie is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a member of Rabble Collective, and serves on the board of Friends of Writers. She is a longtime ninth grade health educator in her hometown of San Francisco, and lives in Oakland, CA. She has been granted residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale, among others. You can find her online at carolinemar.com.

Author photo courtesy of Jessica Tong-Ahn.

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, Primordial, was published in 2025 from Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

maidervang.com

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Bianca Stone is a Vermont-based poet and scholar currently serving as Vermont’s poet laureate. Stone is the author of many books, including the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite which received the 2022 Vermont Book Award, and The Near and Distant World, (Tin House in January, 2026). Her poetry and writings have appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poets and Writers, and The Nation. In 2013 she co-founded the poetry-based nonprofit, Ruth Stone House, where she organizes events and retreats, teaches classes on poetry and poetic study, hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast.

bianca-stone.com

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida. She is the author of GOOD GRIEF, THE GROUND (BOA Editions, 2023, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize) and SUPERSTITIONS OF THE MID-ATLANTIC (2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Prize). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Best New Poets, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and a shortlister for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize (UK), she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. You can read more at www.margaretbray.com, or online @m_rrray (instagram) / @mbrrray (BlueSky)

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Zara Chowdhary is the author of The Lucky Ones. A multi-hyphenate writer, producer, and educator from Chennai, India, she now lives in Madison, WI. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and an MA in Writing for Performance from the University of Leeds. She has taught courses in Hindi and South Asian cultures, protest poetry, and creative nonfiction.

Zara spent her first decade as an adult working in film, advertising and media production including for studios like Eros Entertainment, Red Chillies, and Vinod Chopra Productions. Her work has aired on Channel [V], National Geographic India, and on American television for Turner Classic Movies.

Her prose has appeared in anthologies like New Moons edited by Kazim Ali, as well as online for speculative and environmental journals like Flyway Journal, Cotton Xenomorph.

zarachowdhary.com/the-lucky-ones

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Cherie Jones is a Barbadian novelist and short story writer whose short fiction credits include Reflex Fiction, The Feminist Wire, PANK, Eclectica, and BBC Radio 4. She is a former fellowship awardee of the Vermont Studio Centre and the International Writers Programme of the University of Iowa. She is an alum of the MA Writing Programme at Sheffield Hallam University where she was awarded the Archie Markham Award and the AM Heath Prize. Cherie completed her PhD at the University of Exeter where her research centered on the poetics of violence against women in contemporary Anglo-Caribbean literature. Her first novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021, the OCM BOCAS Prize in 2022 and the Internationel Literaturpreis Prize in 2023 and was translated into French and German. The French translation of her novel won the Prix Carbet des lycéens 2023. Cherie is at work on her second novel.

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Rigoberto González is the author of 20 books of poetry and prose, and the editor of Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology. His awards include the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Shelley Memorial Prize, Guggenheim, Lannan, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships. In 2025 he received the Ruth Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Poetry Foundation. He’s currently distinguished professor at the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark.

poetryfoundation.org/poets/rigoberto-gonzalez

The 2026 Visiting Writers Program is generously supported by The Rona Jaffe Foundation.