About Us

Founded in 1975 by a group of writers and publishers, the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA) works to enrich the literary life and culture of Maine. 

We bring together Maine writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, and literary professionals at all stages of their careers to sharpen craft, create community, and celebrate great writing. The MWPA fosters a greater awareness and readership of Maine writers; builds networks of writers, readers, and publishers; creates opportunities for writers to improve their craft; and acts as the foremost authority on Maine literary news, keeping our members and the public alike engaged and informed. 

The MWPA has an active, growing membership of more than 1,600 writers, readers, and literary professionals from all sixteen counties of the state. Throughout the year, we offer statewide writing workshops, bring free workshops to under-resourced communities, and connect writers with opportunities and scholarships. We host free literary events, like the biennial Maine Lit Fest, and facilitate the annual Maine Literary Awards.

It was early June 1975 when seven Maine writers signed the incorporation papers that founded the MWPA: Agnes Bushell, Miriam Dyak, David Empfield, Bruce Holsapple, Peter Kilgore, Lee Sharkey, and Lynn Siefert. On the occasion of the MWPA’s 20th anniversary, co-founder Agnes Bushell (of Littoral Books) recounted the organization’s early years in a piece entitled “MWPA: Looking Back.”

In October 2010, the MWPA received PEN New England’s prestigious Friend to Writers Award, which is given annually to just one individual and one organization.

Thanks to the continued support of the University of the Southern Maine, the MWPA’s offices are housed within the Glickman Family Library on USM’s Portland Campus. You can read our 2023 Annual Report here.

The MWPA is committed to creating safe environments for its work and programs. You can read our policy and procedures for fostering safe community and prohibiting harassment, discrimination, and retaliation here.

The MWPA is committed to being a literary organization for all of Maine. You can read our statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion here. We issued a statement about Black Lives Matter during the summer of 2020 and stand by it. If you have any questions about what our work toward equity and inclusion looks like, please contact our executive director.

The space we live and work in is unceded Wabanaki territory. You can read our statement of land acknowledgement here.

Our Staff 

Samara Cole Doyon is a poet, educator, and award-winning children’s book author living on unceded Wabanaki / Abenaki territory.She earned both a Lupine Award and an International Literacy Association Award for her debut picture book, Magnificent Homespun Brown  (Tilbury House Publishers, January, 2020). Her second book, Magic Like That (Lee & Low Books, September, 2021), received a starred review from Kirkus and made the Bookstagang Best Picture Books of 2021 list. Samara received a BA in English, with a minor in Poetry Writing from USM, where she also completed a graduate-level teacher training program. She resides with her husband, two children, and rescue pup in central Maine.

Email  samara [at] mainewriters.org
Phone 207-228-8263

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2012. The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic, and Tin House, jubilat, FIELD, and The Literary Review. His fiction has appeared in Slice and Portland Magazine. His second book of poems, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021.

With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, Fay-LeBlanc has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks.

Email  director [at] mainewriters.org
Phone 207-228-8264

Board of Directors

Chelsea Conaboy is a writer and editor. She was a health reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Boston Globe before becoming features editor at the Portland Press Herald. Her first book, on the maternal brain, is forthcoming from Henry Holt & Co. She lives in South Portland with her husband and two sons. Visit: chelseaconaboy.com

Alana Dao is a mother, writer, and restaurant professional who writes mostly about race, contemporary culture, and food. Currently, she is a Co-Director of A CLEARING: A Maine Arts Community and a Co-founder / Managing Editor of KHỔ QUA, a newsletter by CÔNG TỬ BỘT. She received a BA from Smith College and a MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jim Krosschell divides his life into three parts: growing up for 29 years, working in science publishing for 29 years, and now writing in Massachusetts and Maine. His essays are widely published. In 2017 Green Writers Press published One Man’s Maine: Essays on a Love Affair, a collection that won a Maine Literary Award from MWPA. North Country Press published Owls Head Revisited in 2015.

Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Caribou, where she published the quarterly magazine Echoes for 29 years and wrote a bi-weekly column for the Bangor Daily News. She is the author of True North: Finding the Essence of Aroostook (Islandport Press, 2020), editor of Stories of Aroostook: The Best of Echoes Magazine (Islandport Press, 2020), and co-author of Flight to Freedom: World War II through the eyes of a child (Maine Authors Publishing, 2012).

Kimberly Ridley is the author of award-winning nature books for children. She is also a contributing editor to Down East, a former magazine editor, and a science writer whose articles and essays have appeared in many publications including The Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor. Her debut picture book The Secret Pool received the Maine Library Association’s Lupine Award, and she is a two-time MLA finalist. She lives in Brooklin. Learn more.

Robin Talbot is the Co-Director of the Stonecoast MFA program. Prior to joining Stonecoast, She has worked on two documentary films: A Call to Action: A Community's Dream, which outlines the struggle for civil rights in Maine, and Starting Over; Understanding and Supporting Refugee and Immigrant Experiences. Robin is a Portland Stage Company board trustee and the faculty adviser of the Stonecoast Review.

Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction. He lives with his family in Portland.

Bruce Willard’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, as well as on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Foundation’s American Life In Poetry, and The Slowdown. He has published 3 collections of poems: Holding Ground (2013), Violent Blues (2016) and In Light of Stars (2021) - all 3 published by Four Way Books (NYC). In Light of Stars received an Indie Book Award Prize for Poetry in 2022. In addition to his work as a poet, Willard oversees a couple of clothing businesses, including 32 Bar Blues. He lives in Maine and Colorado.

Community Advisory Board

Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), and is a two-time winner of the Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book. She serves as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield.

Jaed Coffin is the author of Roughhouse Friday (FSG, 2019), a memoir about the year he won the middleweight title of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. He's also the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo, 2008), which chronicles the summer he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother's village in Thailand. A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, Jaed's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Nautilus, and The Sun as well the Moth Radio Hour and TED. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters.

Myronn Hardy is the author of five books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for poetry, Kingdom, and most recently, Radioactive Starlings, published by Princeton University Press (2017). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baffler, Rhino, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Bates College.

Rylan Hynes is the Communications Manager at The Telling Room, a youth literary arts nonprofit in Portland, and has worked with independent bookstores and literary nonprofits across the country, including Maine's own Nonesuch Books, Chicago's Women & Children First, and the award-winning poetry press, Alice James Books. In 2020, the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and Maine Community Foundation awarded Rylan a Martin Dibner Fellowship. In 2022, they were named a Lit Fest Fellow by the MWPA and helped organize Maine's inaugural statewide literary festival. When they aren't busy writing short stories, novels, and essays, Rylan enjoys spending time with their spouse and their hedgehog in Hallowell, Maine. You can find their writing in online literary magazines such as The River and Frisson.

Rooted in place and people, Annaliese Jakimides’s poetry and prose have been broadcast on local and national public radio, and published in many journals, magazines, and anthologies. As a freelance worder, she has written about many of Maine’s creatives and supports the work of others working on behalf of all of us, from Detroit, Michigan, to Deer Isle, Maine. After many years in inner city Boston and more years in the woods of Mount Chase, she now lives in downtown Bangor.

Zahir Janmohamed is a visiting assistant professor of English at Bowdoin college. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, and many other publications. Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International and in the US Congress. 

A native of Canada, Sheila Jans moved from Montréal to Maine in 1997. She founded CultureWorth and works as a cultural development consultant. Sheila is also Regional Development Director for the Maine Arts Commission, a part-time, remote position that focuses on supporting the arts in under-resourced parts of Maine. She’s presented nationally and internationally, has written essays about the humanities for the Maine Policy Review, an audio cultural documentary for the international Voici the Valley Cultureway, and a white paper on culture for the Government of Prince Edward Island. Sheila serves on the Maine Policy Review Editorial Board and Cultural Alliance of Maine, and has served on multiple committees and state-wide boards, such as the Maine Humanities Council. Sheila lives with her husband in Madawaska of Maine’s St. John Valley, a stone’s throw away from New Brunswick and Québec.

Donna M. Loring is an elder and former council member of the Penobscot Indian Nation.  She recently served as Senior Advisor of Tribal Affairs to Maine Governor Janet Mills.  She hosts a monthly radio show “Wabanaki Windows” on WERU Community Radio. The University of New England houses her papers and sponsors an annual lecture series in her name.  She is the author of In The Shadow of The Eagle: A Tribal Representative in Maine (Tilbury House, 2008), a memoir based on her time in the Maine State Legislature.

Coco McCracken is the author of The Rabbit, which was the winning manuscript of the 2021 Maine Chapbook Series, as selected by critically acclaimed and best-selling writer Melissa Febos. Her work centers around her favorite subjects: music and celebrity, pop-culture failings of the 90s, and her identity as a woman of half-Asian descent. In 2022, the Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s Alliance named Coco a Lit Fest Fellow, where she helped organize the state’s first inaugural Maine Lit Fest. Coco is an Ashley Bryan Fellow with the MWPA, where she dedicates any extra time to amplifying voices from the BIPOC community. Coco’s work can be found in Amjambo Africa and Maine Magazine, and she is currently working on her first memoir. When she’s not writing, she’s taking photographs and spending time with her family in Portland.

Mihku Paul is a Maliseet writer and visual artist who lives and works in Portland. She is a 2010 graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. Her poetry can be found in multiple publications and has been translated internationally to French and Spanish. Her first book, 20th Century PowWow Playland, was published in 2012 by Bowman Books.

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He received his BA in Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and his MFA in fiction from Stonecoast’s low-residency program. His story collection Night of the Living Rez is forthcoming from Tin House Books (2022), and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize and a recent recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Talty teaches courses in both English and Native American Studies, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.

Arisa White is an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College and a Cave Canem fellow. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, winner of the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature.

 Employment

There are currently no job openings at MWPA, but we encourage to you check with us again whenever curious. Additionally, we are always excited to read new workshop proposals from prospective instructors, and we love hearing from possible new Gather hosts. For more information about these opportunities, please send inquiries to info@mainewriters.org.

 Press