Fellow 2025
Fellowship Council 2026.

DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, an award-winning collection of short fiction from the University of Nebraska Press's Zero Street Fiction series (2024). Her other books include the poetry collections Peculiar Heritage (Mason Jar Press) and Rubbing Elbows (Finishing Line Press), and the novel New to Liberty(Unnamed Press). She has published many short works in journals online and in print. A Bread Loaf alum, Vermont Studio Center fellow, and a graduate of Southamptom’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska’s PhD in English, DeMisty now teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts and plays viola in the Fitchburg State University Community Orchestra. She lives in central Massachusetts with her husband and twin teens. (more)

Fellow 2022.
Fellowship Council 2025, 2026.

Hannah Grieco's debut short story collection First Kicking, Then Not is out now from Stanchion Books. She teaches writing at Marymount University, works as a private book coach and editor, and writes a literary column for Washington City Paper. Read more of her work in The Washington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Brevity, Wigleaf, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.

Fellow 2025.
Fellowship Council, 2026.

LySaundra Janeé (she/her) is a multidisciplinary storyteller, writer, and musician. Her artistic practice draws on Black feminism, speculative relations, magical realism, and spirituality to craft stories that foster radical honesty, communal healing, and joy. 

Previous fellowships and residencies include EmergeNYC, lordship house, Anaphora Arts, and We, As Ourselves through the Center for Cultural Power. LySaundra is a 2026 Art Politics M.A. candidate at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a B.A. in Sociology and a Multicultural Studies certificate. She is a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Songwriting Workshop, Maestra, the Dramatists Guild, UNTITLED Musical Writers Group, and Sigma Alpha Iota Music Fraternity.

Fellow 2023.
Fellowship Council 2026.

Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Dr. Mike McClelland is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has lived on five different continents but now resides in Illinois with his husband, two sons, and a menagerie of ancient rescue dogs. He is the author of the short fiction collection Gay Zoo Day and teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, where he won the 2024 Distinguished Faculty Award. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Guardian, Rolling Stone,The New York Times, WIRED, Boston Review, Vox, The Baffler, Fairy Tale Review, Ecotone, The Fiddlehead, The Offing, and a number of other literary magazines and anthologies. He's a graduate of Allegheny College, the London School of Economics, the MFA Program at Georgia College, the University of Georgia's Creative Writing PhD Program, and the University of Illinois' Diversity and Equity in Education Program. Find him at magicmikewrites.com. 

Fellow 2024.
Fellowship Council 2025, 2026.

Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in Bennington Review, Fence, HAD, Fairy Tale Review, Conduit, and elsewhere. Along with one book of microfictions (out with X-R-A-Y) and one book of poems (out with Okay Donkey), he is the winner of Gasher Press' 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize (Uncle Time, out this October). He is also the host of the Neon Night Mic reading series and he recently launched Piżama Press. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.

Fellow 2024,
Fellowship Council 2025, 2026.

Mathew Rodriguez is an award-winning writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He has worked as a senior editor at The Atlantic, Them and The Body. His work has been featured in The Village Voice, Slate, The Nation, Teen Vogue, The Daily Beast and more. His essays have been anthologized in A Great Gay Book and Modern Loss. He has a memoir, Tough Guy, forthcoming from Abrams Books, as well as a graphic novel forthcoming from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. He teaches writing at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, New York University and Grub Street.

Host.

Michael Todd Cohen is a queer writer, artist and adoptee living in New England. Essays in The Rumpus, Brevity, and Split/Lip, among others. Recipient of the PM Lilac Fellowship for Environmental and Social Justice at Vermont Studio Center (2025). (more)

Host.

Adrian Dallas Frandle is a queer fish who writes poems to the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Press. “Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth” out now with Kith Books. (more)