Congratulations to Meg Gladieux, Winner of the 2025 Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories Fellowship

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is pleased to announce Meg Gladieux as the recipient of the 2025 “Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories” Fellowship, chosen from a strong pool of 42 submissions.

Meg’s proposed memoir looks at how loss and mental illness have affected her family across generations. She describes it as a story about surviving the unsurvivable, and finding joy even while carrying the weight of loss.

Meg Gladieux is a writer, editor, and educator whose work sits at the intersection of storytelling, mental health, and advocacy. She served as assistant on Profiles in Mental Health Courage by Patrick J. Kennedy and Stephen Fried, and currently works with the Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop at Columbia University.

Meg graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied French & Francophone Studies and Cognitive Science, and later earned a master’s degree in education policy. While at Penn, she co-founded The Woodlands Magazine and received the Kerry Sherin Prize and the Salmon Junior Fellows Prize at the Kelly Writers House.

She is currently working toward a master’s in counselor education at the University of Virginia, focusing on school mental health. She plans to become a school counselor while continuing to write personal and reported stories about mental illness, grief, and loss. In her free time, Meg volunteers with children who have lost parents and with survivors of suicide loss.

The “Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories” Fellowship supports a writer working on a short or long-form nonfiction project about personal experience with mental illness, with a focus on stories that offer hope to readers and communities.

Meg’s fellowship included a two-week writing residency at WCDH, with a private suite, dedicated writing space, gourmet dinners five nights a week, and time among fellow creatives.

During her residency, Meg also led a free drop-in zine workshop for youth and young adults at the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library, themed “Tell Your Story,” giving teens ages 11 to 17 a space to explore self-expression through writing and art.

Congratulations, Meg, we are so glad to have supported your story and your voice.

Follow Meg’s work at meggladieux.substack.com or on Instagram @meggladieux.