Summer Faculty 2025 - FINE ARTS WORK CENTER in Provincetown

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, and performance artist. They are the author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America (Haymarket, 2026) and Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020), which won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the Editor-at-Large of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket, 2025), which was long-listed for the Palestine Book Award. They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence.

Workshop: Queering Lineage: a poetics of dis/inheritance

Ron Amato is a Professor in the Photography and Related Media Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. In addition to his extensive career in commercial photography, Amato has published three monographs, and his work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. His most recent book, Artists of Provincetown (2024), is a collection of eighty-four portraits of artists with strong connections to Provincetown, Massachusetts, created over an eight-year period. This work culminated in an exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in the summer of 2024. Amato holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, and an MFA in New Media Art and Performance from Long Island University.

Workshop: The Environmental Portrait

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025), as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the ACLS. Presently, he is an associate professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Franny Choi is a poet and essayist. Their books include The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), winner of the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry; and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Choi’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. They co-edited the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word alongside Terisa Siagatonu, Noʻu Revilla, and Bao Phi. Franny is a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge. Their gayest honor to date is “Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.” Choi’s first essay collection, forthcoming from Ecco Press, is sort of about robots, but mostly about being queer, Asian, and alive.

Workshop: Political Love Poems

Lipe Borges is a Brazilian artist who uses the camera as a tool for connection and storytelling. Focused on portrait and documentary photography, he explores and celebrates the individuality in every person. His work has taken him into prisons, favelas, disaster zones, and vulnerable communities in South America. Rooted in the rhythm and resilience of Capoeira, his art blends movement, presence, and humanity. Based on Cape Cod since 2020, Borges received the 2023 Creative Futures Fellowship and the 2024 Teaching Artist Development Fellowship from The Cordial Eye, and was selected for the 2024 Creative Exchange Cohort by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.

Julia Cumes is a South African–born photographer rooted on Cape Cod whose work traces threads of identity, belonging, and women’s lives around the world. Drawing on her photojournalism background, she uses narrative imagery to explore public health, environmental resilience, and the intimate human stories that define communities from East Africa and South Asia to coastal New England. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and exhibited nationally and internationally. Named the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s 2024 Artist of the Year, she believes in photography’s power to cultivate empathy and reveal overlooked lives.

Workshop: The Art of Visual Storytelling

Alex Webb has published more than fifteen photography books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey book of thirty years of his color photographs. He’s exhibited at museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has been a Magnum Photos member since 1979, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Vogue, and other publications. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His most recent books include Dislocations (Aperture, 2023) and the collaborations with Rebecca Norris Webb; Brooklyn: The City Within (Aperture, 2019), exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York; Waves (Radius, 2022), exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association Museum in spring 2024; and their popular Aperture educational book, Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography & the Poetic Image. He’s currently working on his upcoming Aperture book on U.S. cities, coming out fall 2026.

Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her ten books, most notably in her Radius monograph, My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—for which a solo exhibition of the work appeared at The Cleveland Museum of Art, among other venues. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Le Monde, and The New York Times Magazine, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. A 2019 NEA grant recipient, her most recent body of work is a hybrid poetry book, A Difficulty Is a Light (Chose Commune, 2024), punctuated by fifteen of her photographs, with an accompanying exhibition at the Alessia Paladini Gallery, Milan. Norris Webb is currently working on an ongoing series of photographs in the Dakotas, called Badlands, as well as her upcoming book, Glimmerings, a selection of some thirty years of her lyrical color photographs, which will be released by Radius in Spring 2027.

Workshop: The Intuitive Eye: The Art of Selecting and Sequencing Photographs

Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas (they/them) is an artist, educator, and activist living and working in on the traditional lands of the Comanche - Austin, TX.

Barhaugh-Bordas’s art practice—which expands from print media into installation, as well as social and collaborative practices—works at the intersection of migration, queerness, and ecology. While thinking-through-making, Barhaugh-Bordas asks how art can contribute to ecological knowledge and build interspecies understanding, an inquiry they began investigating by comparing the stories of naturalization—becoming local—between Americans and non-native plants.

Workshop: Cross-Pollination Print

Megan Biddle is a sculptor whose practice spans printmaking and drawing. She has been invited to residencies including MacDowell, The Jentel Foundation, and Sculpture Space. In 2024, she was awarded the Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. Her work was acquired into the U.S. Embassy’s permanent collection in Riga, Latvia. Biddle has taught at institutions including Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School, UrbanGlass, and Oxbow School of Art. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where she is an adjunct associate professor in the Glass Program at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Workshop: Kitchen Sink Casting

Kimberly Blaeser , founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is a multi-genre author. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Her debut short fiction collection, Red Ants, is forthcoming in fall 2026. Blaeser’s honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. An enrolled member of White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts.

Workshop: The Trouble with Relationships. . .

Alexander Chee is a novelist and essayist, most recently the author of the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2021 United Artists Fellow, he is previously a recipient of the Whiting Award and a NEA Fellowship in Prose, and residencies from MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden Castle. A contributing editor for The New Republic and an editor at large for VQR, his stories and essays have appeared recently in T Magazine, Harpers, and Harper's Bazaar. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and is at work on a new novel.

Workshop: The Queer Story You've Never Seen Before

Liz Collins is an NYC- based artist known for her dynamic fiber works that vary in scale, form, and context. Her solo exhibitions and installations have been at the RISD Museum, Museum of Arts and Design , the Tang Museum, and Touchstones Rochdale (England), among others. Collins has been in dozens of group shows: the New Museum, the Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Leslie Lohman Museum, LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Addison Gallery, ICA/Boston, and the Venice Biennale in 2025. Collins’ honors include a USA Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, Drawing Center Open Sessions program, Two Trees Cultural Subsidy Studio Program, and an Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship.

Workshop: Pattern in Motion

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Fulbright, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Emory, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They are an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Workshop: Writing Emotional Stakes: Fiction Workshop

Garrard Conley is The New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Boy Erased (Riverhead/Penguin 2016) and the novel All the World Beside (Riverhead/Penguin 2024), as well as the creator and co-producer of the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America (Limina/Stitcher 2018). His work has been published by The New York Times, Oxford American, Time, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Conley is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow in fiction. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University and on the nonfiction faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Workshop: Leading with Voice: How to Craft Persona in Prose

Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of several books including The Boy in the Labyrinth (U. Akron Press 2019) and The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright Press 2023) which was long listed for the National Book Award. He is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross.

Workshop: Inquiry and Image: A Workshop on Ekphrastic Poetry

Joseph Diggs was born to a military family in Croix Chapeau, France and grew up on Cape Cod where he now lives and paints. Diggs’ work is housed in many private collections on the Cape, nationally, and internationally. Diggs earned his BFA at Southeastern Massachusetts University then returned, after years of travel and work experience, to earn his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is currently represented by the Berta Walker Gallery of Provincetown.

Workshop: Playing with Paint

Jess T. Dugan is an artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of personhood, relationships, desire, love, and family through photography, writing, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over 70 museums. In 2026, they will release Love Pictures, a survey book made in collaboration with curator Charlotte Cotton and published by Radius Books.

Workshop: The Intimate Portrait

Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady (he/him) was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and has recently retired from his position as Professor of English and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In addition to his teaching duties at UT, from 2021-2022 he served as Interim Director at Poets House, a poetry library and cultural center located in New York City. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination; and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre in 1999, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize in 2001. Eady’s pandemic folk song project Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his Trio, was released in 2021 by June Appal Recording. His work and songs have been featured on NPR, BBC Radio 4, and the PBS Newshour. His awards include the 2025 Wallace Stevens award from the Academy of American Poets, Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lifetime Achievement Awards in Poetry from The Poetry Foundation, The National Book Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Poets and Writers Foundation, Furious Flower Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation.

Workshop: Cousins: skating the line between poetry and songwriting

Nick Flynn's most recent book is Low (Graywolf, 2023). His book Stay (Ze Books, 2000) chronicles his work with other artists (filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, etc) over the past twenty-five years. His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012) and has been translated into fifteen languages.

Workshop: Memoir as Bewilderment

Kelli Jo Ford 's novel-in-stories debut, Crooked Hallelujah, was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Story Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Dublin Literary Award, and The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. She is the recipient of honors and awards such as an NEA Literature Fellowship, The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Creative Capital Award, and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship. She teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Workshop: Whose Story? Crafting POV from the First Sentence

Megan Foster earned her BFA from RISD and MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been shown at venues including Black and White Gallery, Mixed Greens, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), and the San Jose Museum of Art.

Foster’s prints and installations elevate everyday moments into open-ended narratives that examine the expectations of contemporary life and shifting connections to nature and technology. Drawing from imagery in art, architecture, and science, she repositions the ordinary as a site of reflection and spectacle.

She is an associate professor and department head of Printmaking at RISD, past master printer at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, and co-founder of Moonlight Editions.

Workshop: Print, Page, Plate: Intaglio Processes and Book Forms

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including, Best American Poetry, spin.com, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Francis wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath. She is the Burlington Northern Foundation Professor in Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Workshop: The Personal 'I' or Why Our Lives Matter

Santee Frazier , a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His first collection of poems, Dark Thirty (2009), was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks series. Frazier’s honors include a Fall 2009 Lannan Residency Fellowship, 2011 School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, the 2014 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Literature Fellowship, and a 2024 Amant Siena Residency Fellowship. His second collection of poems, Aurum, was released in 2019 by The University of Arizona Press.

Workshop: The Poetics of Relationality

Indira Ganesan is the author of three novels: The Journey, Inheritance, and As Sweet as Honey. She was born in Srirangam, India, and grew up in St. Louis, MO, and Rockland County, NY. She held fellowships from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, The MacDowell Colony, The Paden Institute for Writers of Color, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She reviews non-fiction books for Phi Beta Kappa’s online magazine, The Key Reporter, and teaches fiction at Emerson College. She hosts Namaste, a weekly global music program on Cape Cod community radio, WOMR/WFMR. Her website is indiraganesan.com.

Workshop: Love in the Time of War: A Fiction Workshop

David Hilliard creates large-scale multi-paneled color photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him. He is widely published and exhibits nationally and internationally. Hilliard received his MFA from Yale University and has won numerous awards including a Fulbright Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His photographs can be found in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among many others. He is a regular visiting faculty at Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Lesley University. Hilliard’s work appears in many publications and is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York NY, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta GA, The Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown MA, Rivalry Project, Buffalo NY.

Workshop: Motives, Modes, and Motifs: How and Why We Make Photographs

Megan Hinton is a painter known for reconfiguring genres of landscape, figurative, and object painting. Her art utilizes painting’s historic content and technique with found and discarded material to investigate line, color, shape, surface, and scale. This fusion of content and material further defines Hinton as a collagist and sculptor with interdisciplinary practices in installation, photography, and printmaking. In 2024 Provincetown Art Association and Museum honored Hinton with the prestigious annual Award for Artistic Excellence. Hinton holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary arts from Mills College where she won the Hung Lui Painting Prize. She has received residency fellowships from Twenty Summers in Provincetown and The Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. She is a recipient of the Alice C. Cole ‘42 Merit Grant from Wellesley College. Hinton is also an art educator, curator, and writer.

Workshop: Expansive Painting

Pete Hocking is a visual artist, writer, and teacher based on Cape Cod. In addition to being represented by AMZehnder Gallery in Wellfleet, he’s recently shown with BBLG Gallery on Long Island, the Chazan Gallery in Providence, RI, The Dorado Project in Jersey City, NJ, the Plough Gallery in Tifton, GA, and at VeeVee in Boston, MA. In May 2019 he was an artist-in-residence at the Hawthorne Barn with Twenty Summers. He taught at Rhode Island School of Design from 1997-2023. From 2003-2021 he was faculty in Goddard College’s Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts. He’s a founding board member of the Provincetown Commons, a center for the arts and creative economy.

Workshop: Five Ways Forward: Place, Weather, Pathways, Relationships, and Space

Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She likes fanny packs, filing systems, and fresh starts. Her books include a coffee table book (The Long Way Home), a linked collection of stories, poems, and photographs (The Lovers and the Leavers), and a memoir (Olive Witch). She has won fellowships from the NEA, Queens Council on the Arts, NYFA, and the Fulbright Foundation, and holds BS and MA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. See more at olivewitch.com.

Workshop: Writing Personal Statements & Applying for Grants and Residencies

Carlos Francisco Jackson is an artist and writer who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Since July of 2022 he has served as Dean and Professor of the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Francisco Jackson is a printmaker and painter, primarily specializing in screenprinting with a broad curatorial and writing practice that engages the field of Chicano Art. Prior to July of 2022 he was on the faculty at the University of California, Davis where he co-founded Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a community-based workshop in Woodland, California.

Workshop: Narrative Drawing

Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, and World Literature Today among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.

Workshop: Speaking with Paradise: Poetry Engaging with Visual Art

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). His forthcoming cookbook, A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, will be published in October 2026. His honors include fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He is the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize in American Poetry from Yale Library. Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Workshop: Fragmentation Plus Wholeness: Writing the Sequence Poem

Deborah Jackson Taffa ’s Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award finalist, a 2025 Carnegie Medal longlisted title, and a top book of the year at The Atlantic, Time, Esquire, NPR and other outlets. A 2024 NEA Fellow, and a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein grant, she has received fellowships from the University of Iowa and other places. She is the director of the MFACW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.

Workshop: Non-negotiable Me: Writing the Story Only You Can Tell

Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES (Simon & Schuster), winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the poetry collection PRELUDE TO BRUISE (Coffee House Books), winner for the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Oxford American and GQ among other publications. His most recent book ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD (Coffee House Press) won the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. Jones teaches at the Media, Health and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His next book HOME OUT THERE, a memoir, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press. He co-hosts the podcast VIBE CHECK with Zach Stafford.

Workshop: "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Miriam Klein Stahl is a Bay Area diasporist artist, educator, activist and the New York Times-bestselling illustrator of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide. In addition to her work in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, paper-cut and public art, she is also the co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School where she’s taught since 1995. As an artist, she follows in a tradition of making socially relevant work, creating portraits of political activists, misfits, radicals and radical movements. As an educator, she has dedicated her teaching practice to address equity through the lens of the arts. Her work has been widely exhibited and reproduced internationally.

Workshop: Wave Your Queer Flag

Keetje Kuipers' fourth collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Kuiper has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Kuiper is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being.

Workshop: Singing Your Own Song: Knowing and Honing Your Unique Voice

Andrea Lawlor is the author of two chapbooks, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and Position Papers (Belladonna*, 2024), as well as a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017; Vintage, 2019; Picador UK, 2019). Their stories, essays, and poems have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, and The New York Times. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction and the Prix Sade, as well as fellowships from Lambda Literary, Radar Labs, the Ucross Foundation, and Macdowell. They teach writing at Mount Holyoke College, and live in Western Massachusetts.

Workshop: Utopian Writing

Celeste Lecesne (he/they) wrote the short film Trevor, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and inspired the founding of The Trevor Project, the largest 24/7 lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth. For over 30 years, Lecesne has been telling stories as a playwright, actor, screenwriter, author and producer. The New York Times ranked him “among the most talented solo performers of his (or any) generation.” Lecesne is co-founder & Artistic Director of The Future Perfect Project, a national arts initiative dedicated to amplifying the creative voices of LGBTQ+ youth, and he is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Workshop: Story & Structure

Dani Levine is an artist and educator living in Astoria, NY. Mixing pigments, binders, and other found materials, her practice explores themes of chance, agency, and resilience. She has developed painting material courses for schools such as Yale, Princeton, Boston University, Pratt Institute, and Swarthmore College. Through teaching, she engages with artists’ materials as a means to build specificity, context, and agency within artists’ work. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Select honors include group exhibitions at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., The Alfred Museum, and The Abrons Arts Center, as well as an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee, the Fine Arts Work Center, and The Lower East Side Printshop.

Workshop: A Matter of Material: Recipes for Grounds, Paints, and Pastels

Fred H. C. Liang received a BFA from The University of Manitoba and an MFA from Yale University. His honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Arts Grants in painting, printmaking, and works on paper. Liang’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including Fidelity, the Gund Collection, Addison Museum of American Art, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Liang’s most recent exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Addison Museum of American Art in Massachusetts, XC.HuA Gallery in Berlin, and Jerez de la Frontera Gallery at The University of Cadiz, Spain. He was the recipient of the 2020 Joan Michell Foundation Grant and Boston Foundation’s Brother Thomas Fellowship in 2021 as well as a JMF Residency Fellow in 2026. Liang is a Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

Workshop: Watercolor Monoprinting

Jennifer Mack-Watkins is a contemporary visual artist and educator specializing in silkscreen and Japanese woodblock (mokuhanga) printmaking. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and Essence, and is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of the Elizabeth Catlett Printmaking Award and has participated in international and national residencies, including the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Japan and Penland School of Crafts. Mack-Watkins holds a BA from Morris Brown College, a MAT from Tufts University, and an MFA from Pratt Institute, and brings a rigorous, culturally grounded, and student-centered approach to her teaching.

Institutional acquisitions include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library, Library of Congress, Hood Museum of Art, The Perez Museum, The Zimmerli Museum, Agnes Scott College, The Getty Library, Newark Public Library, and Clark Atlanta University. Her work is also held in the permanent collections of ABC Studios and many other private art collections. Jennifer has presented her work in the Rush Arts Gallery 20th Anniversary Exhibition and created a Print Portfolio that was exhibited in New York City, and at Miami SCOPE and PRIZM art fairs.

She is a native of Charleston, South Carolina and currently lives and works in Georgia.

Workshop: The Exchange

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review; The American Poetry Review; Callaloo; Literary Imagination; Poem-A-Day; Poetry; and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s other honors include the Oscar Wilde Award, an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Ambit Prize, and a fellowship from The New York Times Foundation. He is a Fellow and Artistic Director at Cave Canem Foundation. Micheaux’s most recent work is the libretto Sky in a Small Cage.

Workshop: Sublime Aspiration

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of three collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and Staying Still, forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2026. Among his honors, Nguyen has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow from the Poetry Foundation. Originally from the Twin Cities, Nguyen now lives in Oakland and is a lecturer at Stanford University.

Workshop: Let the World Find You

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His translation of Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels is available from Four Way Books. He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Workshop: Cut, Scratch, and Blend: Revision as Remix

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Their newest books are Pathetic Literature and a “Working Life”, poems. Myles’s fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). They live in New York and in Marfa, TX.

Workshop: How to Write a Poem

Cleyvis Natera is an award-winning author, essayist, and critic. Her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was awarded a Silver Medal by the International Latino Book Awards for Best First Book of Fiction. Natera’s second novel is The Grand Paloma Resort. Natera has received awards, fellowships and artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, PEN America, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hermitage Artist Retreat, among others.

Workshop: The Art of the Short Story

Porsha Olayiwola is an individual world poetry slam champion and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is a past Poet Laureate for the City of Boston. She is a 2020 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow. Olayiwola is the Assistant Professor of Poetry at Emerson College. Her work can be found in or forthcoming with Triquarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, Split This Rock, The NBA, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, The Rumpus, Wilderness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.

Workshop: Making a Manuscript: Craft, Sequence, and Revision for Poets

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Workshop: Strangeness, Curiosities, and Defamiliarization

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author, most recently, of Silver. A recipient of a 2025 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he divides his time between New York and Barcelona.

Workshop: The Imagination and Its Rooms: A Week of Poetic Discovery

Michaela RedCherries is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. She has a J.D. from Arizona State University College of Law and an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut mother was a finalist for the National Book Award. She currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM.

Workshop: Narrative Form and Literary Craft of Indigenous Poetics

Seema Reza is a writer and performer and the author of two books: When the World Breaks Open and A Constellation of Half-Lives. Her writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The LA Review, and LitHub among others.

Workshop: Start in the Middle: Writing Memoir Now

Cecilia Ruiz is an author, illustrator, and educator. Her illustration graphic style, rooted in traditional printmaking, lends itself to simple, happy expressions. However, her most compelling works are the ones in which melancholy hides within the bold colors and shapes. Ruiz was born and raised in Mexico City and now lives in New York City, where she teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Queens College.

Workshop: Block Printing for Illustrators

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle is an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, living in Cherokee, NC. She is author of Even As We Breathe (UPK, 2020), the first novel published by an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and winner of multiple awards. In addition to fiction contributions, Clapsaddle’s non fiction work appears in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Salvation South, Bon Appétit, and Travel + Leisure. She is the founder of Confluence: An Indigenous Writers’ Workshop Series, bringing Indigenous authors to the Qualla Boundary to mentor emerging writers.

Workshop: Writing as Ceremonial Practice: At the right time. In the right place. For the right reason.

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, Miami, FL; raised between Miami and Colombia) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose large-scale, visceral paintings explore themes of performance, excess, survival, and transgression. Through fragmented and contorted forms, intoxicating color and uncanny textures, Savdie’s paintings reflect on psychological and societal responses to collective crisis, probing the tension between individual agency and systemic power. Solo exhibitions include ‘Radical Contractions’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and ‘Glottal Stop’ at White Cube New York. Savdie was a recipient of the 2025 Creative Capital Award. Prominent museum collections include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, The Jewish Museum in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Workshop: The Monstrous Body

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. Her 21st book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, is published by Penguin Random House imprint Thesis Books. Schulman is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and holds an endowed chair at Northwestern University.

Workshop: Prose Writing for All Levels

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Workshop: Patience As Practice

Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and raised in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. Her debut book of fiction, INHERITORS (Doubleday), won the PEN Open Book Award and The Story Prize Spotlight Award and has been translated into Spanish and Korean. A recipient of grants from the US National Endowment for the Arts and the Mass Cultural Council, her work has been awarded two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and La Fondation Jan Michalski, among others.

Workshop: The Trouble with Historical Fiction: an intensive revision workshop

Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, and Best New Poets. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.

Workshop: The Haibun: Writing Place, Time, and the Deep Interior

James Stroud is a painter and master printer who is the Founder/Director of Center Street Studio, a professional printmaking workshop that prints and publishes contemporary prints with emerging and established artists. His own work is represented in several public collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; The Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard College. He was the recent recipient of a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Artist Residency in Co. Mayo, Ireland.

Workshop: Jump Start Etching

Ruby T is an artist, educator, and organizer. Her work is an experiment in translating fantasy to reality, and she is fueled by anger, desire, and magic. Rooted in drawing, her practice has offshoots in painting, performance, comics, fibers, and video. She has exhibited and performed at Farm Projects in Wellfleet, MA; Western Exhibitions, Roots & Culture, and Iceberg Projects in Chicago; Hales Gallery in New York; and Bass & Reiner in San Francisco. Her comics and illustrations have been published by Half Letter Press, and are in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives and works on Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Osage land, also known as Louisville, KY.

Workshop: Ritual Embrace: A Painting & Drawing Laboratory

Michelle Tea is the author of many books, including the best selling Modern Tarot, the follow-up Modern Magic, and the recent novel, Little F. She is the recipient of honors from the Lambda Literary Association, the California Library Association, The Rona Jaffe Foundation and PEN/America. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and the founding editor of DOPAMINE Books, among other literary interventions.

Workshop: Witchcraft for Writers

Chiffon Thomas (b. 1991, Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, collage, drawing, performance, and installation. He creates immersive, site-specific environments and forms that explore the adaptability of identity while interrogating systems of power. Drawing from his lived experience as a queer trans person of color, Thomas examines embodiment and social positioning through contorted figures, fractured compositions, and historical references. His assemblages merge abstraction and representation, combining anatomical fragments crafted through hand-building and life casting with reclaimed materials such as iron, glass, concrete, silicone, and fiber. His work portrays identities in flux, navigating intersections of race, gender, queerness, and spirituality.

Workshop: What Shouldn't Be

Vicky Tomayko is an artist and printmaker who lives in Truro, MA. A past FAWC fellow and the current Fine Arts Work Center printshop manager, she leads workshops for fellows, facilitates projects, and works to maintain and improve the printmaking experience at FAWC. Tomayko also teaches silkscreen and painting at Cape Cod Community College. Her work can be seen locally at Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. Visit her website.

Workshop: Waterless Lithography Workshop

Autumn Wallace (b. 1996, Philadelphia, PA) graduated from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2018. Wallace is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work examines myth, gender, sexuality and the Black-femme experience. Their work draws on a diverse range of material and research including early 90’s cartoons, Byzantine aesthetics, “low-quality adult materials”, anthropology and zoology, crafting unique stories and characters which reoccur and evolve throughout their practice. Through this eclectic methodology, Wallace creates alternative narratives which facilitate entryways for excluded voices.

Workshop: Stop Behaving, Start Creating

Forrest Williams is a figurative painter who has shown his work in San Francisco, New York, Portland, Montreal, and for numerous summers at Provincetown's AMP gallery. This summer he will be showing at Schoolhouse Gallery. He was an English major undergrad at Davidson College and received his MFA in painting at the New York Academy of Art. He now lives and works in both New York City and Provincetown. This is his sixth summer teaching at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Workshop: Painting the Figure

Lena Wolff is an artist, craftswoman, independent teacher, and activist for democracy who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s. Her work extends out of American folk-art and quilt making traditions while at the same time being connected to minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, feminist and political art. Wolff’s broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, frequent collaboration, and public projects. Her work is in the permanent collections of ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, the Berkeley Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. She lives with her wife, artist Miriam Klein Stahl, in Berkeley, California.

Workshop: The Natural Palette - an exploration of botanical and earth-based color

Janine Wong is an artist and educator specializing in color, printmaking, and book arts. Wong received an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Art and a BArch from School of Art, Architecture and Planning, Cornell University. Her work is featured in collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond, and the Yale Art Gallery, Brown University, as well as the Rhode Island School of Design. A recipient of a Regional NEA award for works on paper, Wong also served as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally, highlighting her contributions to both book arts and prints.

Workshop: Book Forms: The Shape of Thought