The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 My Time fellowship for writers who are also parents of dependent children under the age of 18. Writers of any literary genre were invited to apply. Mayumi Shimose Poe and Traci Brimhall were selected from 70 applications received from writers across the U.S. Their writing proposals and samples were selected by the judges as rating the highest for literary merit and likelihood of publication. The recipients will each receive a fully funded one-week residency at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow as well as a stipend to cover travel and childcare.
Mayumi Shimose Poe is a freelance editor and writer. Work has appeared in Pebble Go/Pebble Go Next, Bamboo Ridge, Drunken Boat/Anomaly, Frontier Psychiatrist, Hawaii Women’s Journal, Hunger Mountain, Hybolics, and Japan Subculture Research Center. In 2019, Alice on the Island: A Pearl Harbor Survival Story, her middle-grade historical fiction book, was published. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hunger Mountain and won an Editor’s Choice Award from Bamboo Ridge. She is a proud graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Vermont College of Fine Arts; has been on staff with Bamboo Ridge Press, Hawaii Women’s Journal, and American Anthropologist; and has served as a reader for Black Lawrence Press. She lives with her husband and two sons in Washington state.
During her residency, Shimose Poe will be working on a project which will be one of the final stories in a short story collection. The story is set during late 2020, when some public spaces are slowly reopening. It kicks off with the killing of a flamingo at the LA Zoo (a fictional event). Of her project Shimose Poe says, “This COVID era revitalized my project with new questions about being an individual versus being part of a collective; about children’s resilience; about different styles of parenting and how they grow people into this world; about the differential experience of being a parent of color raising children in this world, teaching them to stay alive, stay out of trouble, be respectful, think of others first, et cetera, versus white parents, many of whom were frantically Googling how to talk to their kids about George Floyd’s murder and buying racial awareness books by the cartful.”
Traci Brimhall is the author of five collections of poetry: Love Prodigal (forthcoming, Copper Canyon); Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod; Saudade; Our Lady of the Ruins; and Rookery. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Ploughshares, Orion, and Best American Poetry. She currently lives with her son in Manhattan, KS, where she serves as the Poet Laureate of the state.
Brimhall will be working on a selection of new poetry that speaks to the themes of disability, medical history, family, and nature. Because of her project’s focus on the environment, Brimhall is particularly interested in surrounding herself in the natural landscape of the Ozarks and the healing waters of Eureka Springs, and letting the environment infiltrate her work. Of her project, she says, “With the onset of a physical disability three years ago, I have worked to consider the embodied problems and opportunities of my changed body in its interaction with the natural world. Eco-criticism in literary circles has always been interested in how we can reimagine ways to take pleasure in nature in non-hierarchical and non-exclusionary ways, and so I have tried to reimagine what access can mean. What parts of the sublime experience in nature are still available to me? How closely can I interact with flora and fauna? What does it mean for my body, and for the bodies of others, to take time to be in a natural space?”
The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow would like to thank the Sustainable Arts Foundation for generously funding this fellowship. For more information about sponsoring a fellowship supporting a genre and/or area of interest you are passionate about, visit www.writerscolony.org/sponsor-a-fellowship.
The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is a 501(c)3 nonprofit whose mission is to nurture writers of all backgrounds, genres, and levels of experience in a supportive environment that builds community, stimulates new thinking, energizes creative expression, and optimizes productivity. Since opening its doors to writers in 2000, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow has made a lasting impact on the arts and literary communities hosting over 1,700 writers from 48 states and 13 countries.
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