Join us for L I V I N G L E G A C Y: A Reading with the Ashley Bryan Fellows at the Ossipee Valley Music Festival as part of a Maine Day celebration which features artists from all over Maine in multiple disciplines!
Zahir Janmohamed is an 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, 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, CNN, NPR, The Boston Review, The Guardian, McSweeney's, Scroll India, The Economic Times and many other publications. His media appearances include NPR, CNN, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Live Wire, The Dear Sugar Podcast, and others.
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. Coco was a Maine Lit Fest Fellow, and is on the MWPA Community Advisory Board. She is also the Assistant Editor and Podcast Manager at AudioFile Magazine. You can read her most current essays on her Substack: Coco’s Echo: https://cocosecho.substack.com/
Wendy Newell Dyer is a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Nation. Given up at birth and later adopted, she searched for and found her biological parents when she was twenty-five and began her journey to come to know herself as a Passamaquoddy woman. Her story "A Warrior's Homecoming" appeared in Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writers from New England in 2014. She wrote for three Washington County newspapers. Several of her stories have been published in the online literary magazine Dawnland Voices 2.0, two Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and Homeschooling Today magazine, as well as a feature in The Maine Standard. As an adoptee, Wendy testified before the Maine Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. She shared her adoption story on WERU's Dawnland Signals. Newell Dyer was one of the recent winners of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Call for Native Writers and was awarded a 2022 MWPA Ashley Bryan Fellowship.
Jenna Dela Cruz Vendil is an award-winning organizer, activist, and engagement strategist who works to build inclusive systems through social action, policy, and electoral engagement. Coming to this career from an arts and cultural organizing lens and personal adverse childhood experiences, Jenna knows the power of storytelling on our social fabric, to reframe narratives for systems change and to liberate memory. After becoming a mother, Jenna found their way back into writing after an 18 year hiatus. Currently in creative recovery, Jenna’s writing practice explores grief, parenting, disability, and her family’s experience of colonization and diaspora from the Philippines. Vendil works for the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, facilitating experiential opportunities for students to step into their power, on their journey for social change.
Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, and she/her) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow and was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Maya has been a finalist in the New England Book Awards and Maine Literary Awards and won Garden Party Collective's chapbook contest. Ey also won the 2025 Headlight Review's chapbook contest. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts for Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry at Randolph College in June 2022. They were a finalist of the Slam Free Or Die Qualifier Slam for their National Poetry Slam 2018 team and a runner up of the Slam Free or Die Individual Slam Championship in 2018, and she was a recipient of the Maine Humanities Council's Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024. Catch Maya hosting the hybrid open mic series Port Veritas on Tuesday nights and hosting the hybrid writing workshop series at Novel Maine on Sunday mornings.
For more information on the Ashley Brain Fellowship Program, please visit this link!