Vermont Studio Center

Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine 2023), a Stonewall Honor Book also shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Mizna, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She has been a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center and currently serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). She grew up in a Lebanese family near Pittsburgh and now lives in Austin, Texas, with her wife.

sarahcypher.com

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

Kurt Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently, Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road, with 35 full-color illustrations by artist Julia Oldham. Winner of a Foreword Indie Silver Medal for science writing, Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog, tells the story of the first animal to orbit the Earth, the Soviet space dog Laika, who flew on Sputnik II in 1957. An Inside Passage won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. He is co-editor with James Perrin Warren of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez . Caswell’s essays, stories and reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, Orion, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, Terrain.org, and other publications. He is a graduate of both the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College (MA), and the Bennington College Writing Seminars (MFA). He is professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches writing, literature, and an intensive study abroad course while walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

kurtcaswell.com

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

Charmaine Wilkerson is a Caribbean-American writer who is originally from New York and has lived in Jamaica and Italy. Her writing frequently explores shifting ideas of home, family and self. She is the author of two novels, Black Cake and Good Dirt, and her award-winning short fiction can be found in various anthologies and magazines. Her debut novel, Black Cake, was adapted for the screen as a mini-series. A former news and communication professional, Charmaine is a graduate of Barnard College and Stanford University. She is grateful for the support she has received from residencies at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Hedgebrook, and Vermont Studio Center.

Author photo courtesy of Sian Trenberth.

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

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections: Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press/Atria, 2024), I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.

Clark is a winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the winner of the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021–22 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark was the 2017–18 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Clark is currently working on Begging to Be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Atria.

tianaclark.com

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

Marcella Pixley has written five acclaimed novels for young people: Freak, Without Tess, Ready To Fall. Trowbridge Road and most recently, Neshama. Freak received four starred reviews and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, Without Tess was a Junior Library Guild Selection, Ready to Fall was named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. Trowbridge Road was a Junior Library Guild Selection. It was long listed for the National Book award and the Massachusetts Book Award. It was named a best book of 2020 by Shelf Awareness, Reading Group Choices and Mighty Girls. It was a finalist for a Golden Dome Award. Marcella's fifth novel Neshama (her very first novel in verse) was published by Candlewick Press in Summer 2025 and has been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. Marcella's debut picture book A Sip of Sunrise is forthcoming from Candlewick Press in 2026. Marcella teaches 8th grade Language Arts at Carlisle Public Schools in Massachusetts.

marcellapixley.com

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

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. Cynthia is an alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), Anaphora Literary Arts, and The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension. For fifteen years, Cynthia worked with social movements for racial, gender, climate, and migrant justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Based in Los Angeles, Cynthia is currently working on screenplays and serving as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine. For more information, visit cynthiadewioka.com.

Author photo courtesy of Jose Quintana

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

Carolyn Kuebler’s debut novel, Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, was published in May 2024 by Melville House. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season” (Massachusetts Review) won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay. She was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the award-winning New England Review in Middlebury, Vermont.

carolynkuebler.com

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

Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness published by Graywolf Press. His other collections include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage which received the Lambda Literary Award. Wunderlich has published individual poems in in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been widely anthologized. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Amy Lowell Trust, The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University. He is Executive Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program, and lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

markwunderlich.com

Author photo courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan.

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

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Bernard is the winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2024-2025 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography and a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the 2024-2025 Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University.

emilybernard.com

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

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, W.S. Merwin Conservancy, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation, and U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker and won the 2024 Levis Reading Prize. FSG will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth.

elisamariegonzalez.com

Author photo courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan

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