The Mount and Straw Dog Writers Guild

Nine Writers Residences

By: Mount - Jan 13, 2026

 

The Mount and Western Massachusetts’ Straw Dog Writers Guild are thrilled to announce the nine writers selected for the 2026 Residency for Emerging Writers.

The 2026 residents will be working on developing their respective works at The Mount for one week each, between March 1 and March 21.

Submissions were reviewed anonymously and ranked based on quality of writing, originality of voice, and the potential for growth as a writer.

“The selection committee was invigorated by the depth and originality of the applications,” says Sarah Margolis-Pineo, residency lead and Public Programs Director at The Mount. “We can’t wait to welcome the nine talented writers to Edith Wharton’s home in the spring.”

This is the twelfth year The Mount has offered writers an opportunity to create at The Mount and its fifth year partnering with Straw Dog Writers Guild. The revamped residency now focuses on writers who are developing their craft. There is no prerequisite for being published. Applications open in September each year on edithwharton.org.

The Mount/Straw Dog Writers Guild 2026 Writers-in-Residence are:

Victoria Baena is a writer and translator whose work explores topics across narrative theory, politics, gender, mobility and migration. Her essays and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Boston Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is currently completing her first book, A Sentimental Education: Amélie Bosquet & Gustave Flaubert (forthcoming with Yale University Press), which has been supported by a Camargo Foundation fellowship, Jentel Arts Residency, and a Kathy Chamberlain Award. She received a PhD in comparative literature from Yale and was formerly a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she teaches literature at UVA. 

As an African American, queer, neurodivergent woman, Sharon DuPree’s work showcases and confirms peripheral populations, bringing them to the center for exploration and appreciation. Her goal is to tell unconventional stories that promote awareness and understanding of identity variation in communities of color. She recently completed her memoir, Because of Shebbie. The book documents her class transition from deep poverty to middle class status using her unique intersectional perspective. Her latest publication, “Stay Right Where You Are,” appeared in the on-line journal, midnight & indigo. Sharon has also published short stories in Quarterly and poetry in The Chestnut Hill Shuttle. She earned her doctorate in Secondary Education and a master’s in English literature from NYU. Sharon’s teaching experience includes adjunct faculty positions in the English and Education departments in New York and Philadelphia.

Ali Goldstein is a writer in Manchester, New Hampshire, where she lives in a renovated textile mill with her husband and two cats. Formerly the speechwriter for the President of the University of New Hampshire, she is today the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Currier Museum of Art. She earned her undergraduate degree in French and Creative Writing from American University and her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Maryland, where she was a Dean’s Fellow and recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction. She is currently querying her first novel about a young woman training to become a competitive runner in postwar Detroit and her granddaughter who finds her own voice telling her grandmother’s story nearly a century later.

Caprice Gray holds a BA from Yale, a Master of Science from Harvard University, and an MFA in Writing from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. A 2025 Hawthornden Fellow and recent Susan G. Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow with the Center for Fiction, her work has been supported by Jentel Arts, SAFTA, Millay Arts, Storyknife, and others. She has been longlisted for the First Pages Prize and Granum Prize, and is the 2025 recipient of Storyknife’s Barbara G. Peters Fellowship for Historical Fiction. Her work explores themes of Otherness. She is from traditional Wecksquaesgeek territory, Harlem New York.

Margaret Jameson recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, where she served as Fiction Editor for Washington Square Review. She also taught Introduction to Prose and Poetry to NYU undergraduates, exploring the craft of literature through the lens of speculative and experimental works. Her story, “The Women,” published in F(r)iction #18: The Legacy Issue, was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. Margaret has been awarded a creative residency from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, a New York State Summer Writers Institute Merit Scholarship, and the New York Science Fiction Society’s Wollheim Memorial Scholarship to attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at UCSD.

Molly Lanzarotta writes fiction and poetry. Her story “Memories of a Tsunami Unseen” won the 2024 London Independent Story Prize for flash fiction. Her poem “Sending Texts During the Holocene Extinction” won second prize for the 2023 Moth Nature Writing Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Rumpus, The Irish Times, The Notre Dame Review, About Place, Terrain.org, Columbia Journal, Cimarron Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southeast Review, and the Bath Flash Fiction anthology Snow Crow. She is grateful for support from fellowships and grants, including those from Millay Arts, The Outer Cape Artists in Residence Consortium (OCARC), and the city of Boston's Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture.

Arya Samuelson is a writer, editor, educator, and somatic practitioner-in-training in Western Massachusetts. She is the winner of New Ohio Review’s Nonfiction Prize, Lascaux Review’s Nonfiction Prize, and CutBank’s Montana Prize in Nonfiction awarded by Cheryl Strayed. Her essay, “I Am No Beekeeper” was selected as Notable in Best American Essays 2024. Other essays and stories have been published in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, Columbia Journal, Gertrude, and elsewhere. Arya holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and her work has received support from Marble House, Virginia Creative Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

Nina Michiko Tam's debut novel, Tastes Like Seeing God, is forthcoming in 2027 from Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. She recently won the 2025 Asian American Writers’ Workshop Pages-in-Progress Award. She was born and raised in Hawai‘i, graduated from Yale Law School, and now works in Houston, Texas as a civil rights lawyer fighting for underrepresented communities across the state.

Hafsa Zuliqar is a poet, editor, and literary critic from Sindh, Pakistan. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Cornell University, and earned her BA in Literature and Psychology from Bennington College. Her work which has received three Best of the Net, a Pushcart nomination, and support by grants and fellowships from We Need Diverse Books & Brooklyn Poets can be found or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Pleiades, swamp pink, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, The Margins, Poetry Wales, Lunch Ticket, Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, DIALOGIST, & elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and as an assistant editor for EPOCH. | @vibingwithaboo
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STRAW DOG WRITERS GUILD Dog

The mission of Straw Dog Writers Guild is to unite and inspire writers throughout their diverse communities. Straw Dog Writers Guild supports writers virtually and in-person through craft workshops, open mics, on-line writing opportunities, social gatherings, authors’ showcases, networking, writing residencies, high school scholarships, an Emerging Writers Fellowship, and more. All are welcome.