September 30, 2026 to October 9, 2026
BRUNSWICK | FARMINGTON | LEWISTON | NORTHEAST HARBOR | PORTLAND | PRESQUE ISLE | I ROCKPORT | SCARBOROUGH | WATERVILLE
2026 Headlining Guest Authors
from left to right: adrienne maree brown, Patrick deWitt, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Min Jin Lee
2026 Featured Authors and Speakers
Special Guests
Author & Illustrator Bios
Samaa Abdurraquib
Samaa Abdurraquib
After spending most of her life in the Midwest, Samaa has been loving and living on unceded Wabanaki/Abenaki land (Maine) since 2010. She earned her PhD in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (NatureCulture, 2023). Her chapbook Towards a Retreat (2025) is available now from Diode Editions. Samaa’s other work can be found in a variety of journals and books including: Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Cider Press Review, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (2022), and Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film (2017).
Samaa currently serves as the Executive Director of Maine Humanities and as a coach for leaders of color working in Maine. She is a certified Maine Master Naturalist, which allows her to lead outdoor teaching experiences for people who want to learn about the beings (plants, insects, animals) in this region. Samaa is always listening for birdsong.
Charlotte Agell
Charlotte Agell
Charlotte Agell is the author/illustrator of many books for children. Originally from Sweden, she lives in Brunswick, Maine.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Megan Mayhew Bergman is an award-winning fiction writer, conservation journalist, filmmaker, and cultural critic. She serves as Director of Creative Writing at Middlebury College and Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She is the author of four books and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere
Tom Booth
Tom Booth
Tom Booth is an author and illustrator of children’s books, a game developer, and a designer for screens large and small. Tom grew up outside Philadelphia, studied history at Hamilton College, worked as an art director at Scholastic, and now lives in Maine with his wife and son. Also, his middle name rhymes with broccoli.
Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, currently serving a term from 2021 to 2026, and is the author of three poetry collections: Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, June 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is also the librettist for the short chamber opera, Ghost Apples, created in collaboration with composer Nathan Davis and to be performed by the Halcyon Quartet in the fall of 2025. Bouwsma’s honors include a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards. Her work can be found in various publications including Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Daily. She has taught in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington, serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and works as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME.
Elisa Boxer
Elisa Boxer
Elisa Boxer is an Emmy-winning journalist, two-time Sydney Taylor Honor author, and two-time Maine Literary Award winner for Best Children's Book. Her titles include: Hidden Hope, Dear Younger Me, Full Circle, The Voice that Won the Vote, Pine Cone Regrown (A New York Public Library Best Book of 2025), Tree of Life (winner of the Maine Lupine Honor), and One Turtle's Last Straw (winner of the Maine Chickadee Student's Choice Award). Elisa lives with her family in Southern Maine.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of eighteen books, is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.
She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the nonprofit advocating for authors, readers, and freedom of expression. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the Board of Directors of GLAAD; she was co-chair of GLAAD’s board of directors from 2013-17. She also is a member of the faculty of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College, and the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy.
For many years she was a Contributing Opinion Writer for the opinion page of the New York Times; she has also been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
Her most recent book is the memoir Good Boy: My Life in 7 Dogs, published by Celadon/Macmillan in April of 2020. Her next book project is the novel Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult, slate for publication in autumn of 2022 by Ballantine/Random House.
Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders(Broadway/Doubleday/Random House) was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. A novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, she is also a nationally known advocate for human rights. Jenny has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show on four occasions; Live with Larry King twice; the Today Show, the Barbara Walters Special, NPR’s Marketplace and Talk of the Nation; she has also been the subject of documentaries on CBS News’ 48 Hours and The History Channel. She served as an advisor to the television series Transparent.
She lives in New York City, and in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie. They have a son, Sean and a daughter, Zai.
adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown (she/they) is growing a garden of healing ideas. Informed by decades of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy,Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Loving Correction as ideas and practices for transformation. She was awarded the Auburn Institute’s Spiritual Resilience Fellowship in its inaugural year, 2019-2020. In 2022 she was awarded the Jack P Blaney Award for Dialogue from the Simon Frasier University Center for Dialogue and the Barry Dym Champion for Change Award from the Institute for Nonprofit Practice. adrienne is the NYT-bestselling author/editor of several published texts, a ritual singer-songwriter, co-generator of the Lineages of Change Tarot Deck, and co-creator/host of How to Survive the End of the World podcast with Autumn Brown.
David Bruggink
David Bruggink
David Bruggink is a graphic novelist, field recordist, and product designer living in Portland, Maine with his wife, daughter, and feral one-year-old boy. Growing up in the greater Washington, D.C. area, David’s journey has been diverse, both creatively and geographically. After studying abroad in China, he taught English in France for a year, then worked in web design. He manages a website called Sounds of Maine that features "audiovisual postcards" of life in Maine. Beyond creating his own comics, David enjoys teaching comics workshops for kids in Southern Maine.
Lydi Conklin
Lydi Conklin
Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, American Short Fiction, VQR, and elsewhere. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. 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.
Sonya Donaldson
Dr. Sonya Donaldson
Dr. Sonya Donaldson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Colby College. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American Literature and Culture, Digital Humanities, Black German Studies, and AI. She is the curator of the digital humanities project Singing the Nation, an ephemeral archive of performances of James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the executive director of Media and Archives for the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA). Her book manuscript, “Irreconcilable Differences: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora,” is in progress. Her digital research project, Fictions of Black Girlhood, examines how generative AI tools interpolate Black girls within spatial and poetic contexts, thereby (re)producing tropes of Blackness and shifting the textual and visual terrains of Black girlhood. Donaldson earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia and a BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her work has appeared in The Digital Black Atlantic, sx salon, Women, Gender and Families of Color, Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts, and African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.
Patrick deWitt
Patrick deWitt
Patrick deWitt is the author of the novels French Exit (a national bestseller), The Sisters Brothers (a New York Times bestseller short-listed for the Booker Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.
Justin Ellis
Justin Ellis
Justin Ellis is a writer. His first nonfiction book, The Cruelty of Nice Folks is now available from Harper. His day job is projects editor for Defector, an employee-owned media company, where he oversees podcasts like Normal Gossip and Namedropping. His TV credits include Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas on HBO and How to Fix a Drug Scandal on Netflix. In his previous lives he has been a podcast host, magazine editor, media business reporter and a newspaper beat writer. Over the years he’s worked at organizations like ESPN, The Nieman Journalism Lab and The Portland Press Herald. His writing has appeared in publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, GQ, DC Comics and Dwell. He was the host of ESPN’s Doubletruck Stories, a narrative podcast showcasing features and investigations from ESPN writers.
Katherine Ferrier
Katherine Ferrier
Katherine Ferrier is a queer poet, dancer, and textile artist based in Rockland, Maine. She is a founding member of the movement improvisation ensemble The Architects, whose collaborative performance history spans over 30 years. Her writing has been featured in several magazines and anthologies, including Uppercase Magazine, Contact Quarterly, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis published by Littoral Books, and the MidCoast Poetry Journal. Since 2018, she has been the Director of the Medomak Fiberarts Retreat, where she teaches patchwork, slow stitching, and both movement and writing for makers.
Nick Fuller Googins
Nick Fuller Googins
Nick Fuller Googins is the author of the novels The Frequency of Living Things and The Great Transition. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Men’s Health, The Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine and works as an elementary school teacher. He is a member of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Alexis’s books are portable textual ceremonies. Publisher’s Weekly calls her writing “groundbreaking.” She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and the award-winning Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, which won the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a National Humanities Center Fellowship, Dr. Gumbs lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LGBTQ brilliance.
Jamie Hogan
Jamie Hogan
Jamie is an award-winning illustrator and author living three miles out to sea. She is the author and illustrator of Skywatcher and The Seven Days of Daisy, as well as the illustrator of over twenty children’s books and adult titles. She illustrated Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins, winner of the Jane Addams Peace Association Award and named on the New York Public Library’s list of 100 Best Books.She was an adjunct professor at Maine College of Art in Portland from 2003 to 2018, Studies. She is currently a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Her newest book is The Cosmic Journey of Jessica Meir, a picture book biography of Maine's astronaut from Caribou. Jamie is an avid sketchbook keeper, drawing inspiration from moonlight, reflections, pink clouds, wishing on the first star, and the raw beauty that is Maine.
Zahir Janmohamed
Zahir Janmohamed
Zahir Janmohamed is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he won awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded, Racist Sandwich, about food, race, gender, and class, was nominated for a James Beard Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, and many other publications. He has received fellowships and scholarships from MacDowell, Kundiman, Tin House, VONA, Bread Loaf, and many other places. Before beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International and in the US Congress.
Micah Johnson
Micah Johnson
Micah Johnson, a former Major League Baseball player turned artist, is the creator of the phenomenon that is Aku. After overhearing a young boy ask his mom if astronauts could be Black, Micah was inspired to create Aku, a 3D animated boy wearing an oversized astronaut helmet. That same year, Micah created a fine art piece that catapulted him from retired athlete to creator of the “2020 NFT of the Year." Aku: Journey to Ibra is Aku's origin story and Micah's first book. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughters.
Kea Krause
Kea Krause
Kea Krause is a science and nature writer based in Maine. Her work has appeared inThe Atlantic, National Geographic, Orion, Sierra and Wired, among other media outlets, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Travel Writing and Best American Food Writing. In 2024, her piece about the Penobscot River dam removal was a finalist for a National Nonprofit News Award. In addition to writing and reporting, Kea is a 2026 MWPA Lit Fest Fellow where she also occasionally leads workshops, and a member of the Wild Seed Project nonprofit board.
Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times "100 Best Books of the Century.” Lee's third novel American Hagwon will be published on September 29, 2026.
As New York State Author Laureate (2025-2027), Lee received the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. Her fiction has been translated into over 35 languages. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
Lee served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories 2023. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She is at work on the novel, Marshall Plan, the fourth of the Diaspora Quartet, and writing Name Recognition, a memoir. Lee lives in Harlem with her family.
Andrés Vera Martínez
Andrés Vera Martínez
Andrés Vera Martínez is the co-creator and illustrator of the graphic novel series Monster Locker. He is also the co-author and illustrator of the graphic memoir Little White Duck: A Childhood in China and illustrator of Neal Shusterman's Courage to Dream: Tales of Hope in the Holocaust. Andrés’s work has been recognized by the New York Times, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, NPR, the Society of Illustrators, Junior Library Guild, and Slate. Originally from Texas, Andrés now lives in New England with his family.
Hannah Matthews
Hannah Matthews
Hannah Matthews (she/her) is an author, essayist, poet, and bookseller/indie bookstore marketing coordinator. Her debut book, You or Someone You Love (Atria Books, 2023), was a finalist for the New England Book Award, a Kirkus-starred title, and was named the American Library Association's RISE Feminist book of the year. Her second book, Sweet-Blooded, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2027. Her writing has appeared in TIME Magazine, The Guardian, Esquire, Vogue, Literary Hub, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, ELLE, Jezebel, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and more publications. She lives in Maine with her family.
Margaret McNamara
Margaret McNamara
Margaret McNamara is the author of over forty books for children, among them How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?, which was awarded the Oppenheimer Toy Portfolio Best Book Gold Award; Daisy Rewilds, which Kirkus called "a botanical wonder" (and which was written on a porch in Boothbay Harbor); and Vote for Our Future, which Publishers Weekly called "exhilarating." Ms. McNamara lives in New York City, and spends the summer in Midcoast Maine.
Brandon Mitchell
Brandon Mitchell
Brandon Mitchell, hailing from Listuguj First Nations in Quebec, now calls the unceded Wolastoqiyik Peace and Friendship Treaty territory of Fredericton, New Brunswick, his home. Married to Natasha Martin and father to Brayden and Bryce Mitchell, he holds a diploma in animation and design from the New Brunswick Community College of Miramichi, as well as a master's degree in education from the University of New Brunswick. With over two decades of expertise in graphic novels, gaming, and animation, Brandon is a seasoned multidisciplinary artist.
Alex Nelson
Alex Nelson
Alex Nelson is an artist based in Waterville, Maine. She uses photography, moving images, and writing to create elliptical associative narratives. She received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology and her MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art. Her book of writing and images, Liner Notes, was published by Quickbooks in 2021. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Colby College.
Kate Olson
Kate Olson
Kate Olson is a writer, climate sociologist, and educator. Her work explores the interconnections among people, places, and livelihoods in a changing climate, from mega-dams in Southeast Asia to small town food systems. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, The Guardian, DownEast, Earth Island Journal, Buzzfeed News, and Civil Eats, among other places, and her essay “Dis-ease” was the recipient of the 2021 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. Her book, Living Change: Finding Place in a Warming World, is under contract with HarperOne Publishers.
Kate is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Boston College, an MA in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University, and a BA in Sociology and Psychology from Middlebury College. She lives in the homelands of the Abenaki peoples of the Wabanaki Confederacy, in what is also called Maine.
Ladan Osman
Ladan Osman
Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. A 2021 Whiting Award winner, she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Osman's first short film Sam Underground profiles Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She’s the co-director/writer of Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian emperor, Mansa Musa. Osman’s latest film work, The Ascendants, a music short documentary series is streaming now. She lives in New York.
Maria Pinto
Maria Pinto’s book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, was published in 2025. Publishers Weekly notes, “With echoes of Jamaica Kincaid and Annie Dillard, this is a treat for nature lovers and mushroom aficionados.”
When she’s not in the woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers’ Room of Boston, The Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green.
Her fiction has appeared in Obsidian, Frigg, and Necessary Fiction, among publications, and her nonfiction can be found in Science, Orion Magazine, LitHub, Longreads, Arnoldia, and Mushroom People. Maria has spoken about foraging, food autonomy, and fungal poetry, among other topics via Bust Magazine, NPR stations WGBH, WBUR, and WAMC, PBS’s Poetry in America, the website Public Lands, and podcasts including unladylike.
Gary Rainford
Gary Rainford
Gary Rainford, author of three poetry collections, Adrift, Salty Liquor, and Liner Notes, lives on Swan’s Island year-round. Gary's poems, shaped by tides, saltwater, music, and experience, are published in a wide range of literary magazines, university journals, and newspapers. Adrift is a love story, says poet Sharon Doubiago, and his poems tell the story of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri
Onnesha Roychoudhuri
Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a writer, educator, and strategic troublemaker. Passionate about the ways in which the stories we tell can change the arc of our lives and history, her work engages at the intersection of storytelling and social justice. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, Kenyon Review, n+1, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, The Nation, Salon, and Mother Jones. She has read and performed on stages for The Moth, TEDx, Lincoln Center, and more. Her book, The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America, was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by Kirkus Reviews.
Richard Russo
Richard Russo
Richard Russo is the author of ten previous novels, most recently Somebody's Fool, Chances Are..., Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; the memoir Elsewhere; and the essay collection Life and Art. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. His most recent novel is Under the Falls. He lives in Falmouth, Maine.
Sarah Sax
Sarah Sax
Sarah Sax grew up in St. Louis, MO on Uncle Scrooge and Sailor Moon comics. She studied storytelling and sequential imagery at Hampshire College and worked in education and gaming in the Bay Area before starting her publishing journey. She is the illustrator of the interactive Escape This Book series and is the author and illustrator of Picture Day, Tryouts, and School Dance, the first three graphic novels in the Brinkley Yearbooks series, as well as the upcoming fourth book, Class Trip. Her graphic novels have all been featured on the ALA Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table “Best Graphic Novels for Children" reading list, and School Dance was selected for the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee’s Best Children’s Books of 2025 and Kirkus Review's Best Children’s and Young Adult Books of 2025. Sarah lives and works in Portland, Maine with her husband and a small menagerie of pets.
Josie Sibara
Josie Sibara
Josie Sibara is the author of The Galaxie and Other Rides (Livingston Press, 2012), a collection of stories about growing up in post-industrial Detroit, and a book of poems, living must bury (Fence Books, 2010), which won the Motherwell Prize. Josie completed a PEN Northwest Wilderness Residency, during which she lived for six months on a remote homestead above Rogue River in southern Oregon’s Klamath Mountains. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. The draft of her first novel recently won the James Jones First Novel Fellowship.
t love smith
t love smith
t love smith (they/themself/we/us) is a queer poet living on unceded Wabanaki land. they are a recent graduate of Stonecoast MFA and founder and development curator of the Trans Poetics Archive which published Maine's first transgender poetry anthology, Monster Beauties, a Finalist for a 2026 Maine Lit Award. t's poem, “from the barrens,” received the 2026 Maine Lit Award for Short Poetry Works.
Melissa Sweet
Melissa Sweet
Melissa Sweet is an award–winning children's book author and illustrator. She is an avid birder and Maine naturalist, and lives in Portland, Maine. Visit her work at www.melissasweet.net.
Ryan Bani Tahmaseb
Ryan Bani Tahmaseb
Ryan Bani Tahmaseb is an author, academic coach, and curriculum developer who specializes in supporting twice-exceptional (“2e”) students, particularly those with ADHD. His debut picture book, Rostam’s Picture-Day Pusteen (Charlesbridge, 2024), was selected for the Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year 2025 and chosen by the Maine Humanities Council to represent the state of Maine at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival. His debut middle grade book, Persian Mythology: Epic Stories of Gods, Heroes, and Monsters (Running Press Kids, 2025), was selected for the Children’s Book Council’s 2026 OMG: Only for Middle Graders Recommended Book List. His next picture book, I Want to Eat (With) You, is forthcoming from Eerdmans Books for Young Readers in 2027. He lives in Southern Maine with his wife and two young children.
Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation and the author of the novel Fire Exit (Tin House, 2024) and the national bestselling story collection Night of the Living Rez (Tin House, 2022).
Night of the Living Rez won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, the New England Book Award for Fiction, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize. It was a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.
Fire Exit is a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and has been longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was named a TIME Top 10 Fiction of 2024, a New Yorker Best Book of 2024, and an ALA Notable Book.
His work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Harvard Review, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night and three consecutive years in The Best American Short Stories.
Talty co-directed, wrote, and acted in the documentary short Belongings, which premiered at Hot Docs 2023 and was named a Vimeo Staff Pick and Short of the Week.
Talty is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine, where he teaches fiction, literature, and Indigenous studies. He is also on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA Program. He serves as Senior Prose Editor for The Massachusetts Review.
Maria Testa
Maria Testa
Maria Testa is the author of highly acclaimed, award-winning books for children and young adults, including Becoming Joe DiMaggio (Maine Lupine Award), Something About America (Maine Literary Award), and, most recently, The Day Of Stolen Bicycles. She lives in Portland, Maine, where she is known for her passion for books, sports, and social justice. She knows she is lucky because she has always had a home.
Alexandra Thompson
Alexandra Thompson
Alexandra Thompson is a Maine based illustrator and author creating work for picture books, children’s apparel, and magazines. Her charming and cozy illustrations are created with a blend of digital and traditional media, with a soft spot for watercolors and colored pencils. She is the creator of HAZEL & HERBERT and the illustrator of BEN & EMMA'S BIG HIT by California governor Gavin Newsom and I AM A MASTERPIECE! by actress and Down syndrome advocate Mia Armstrong. Visit her online at alexandraco.com and follow her on Instagram @alexandraco_illustration.
Emerson Whitney
Emerson Whitney
Emerson Whitney is the author of three critically acclaimed memoirs, O Mother, Daddy Boy, and Heaven. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. The recipient of the Maine Writers & Publishers Award for Memoir in 2024, Emerson is grateful to live Downeast.