Joanna Glum is a writer for the screen and stage. As a filmmaker, she's worked on features such as Lady Bird and Bumblebee. She was named a Sundance Screenwriting Lab Semi-Finalist and American Zoetrope Screenplay Finalist, selected by Francis Ford Coppola, for her screenplay Kate. Her short, You Should Get out More, is currently on the festival circuit. A former Penn Plays Fellow, Joanna’s playwriting was featured at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and premiered at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her plays have also been published in The Brooklyn Review and by Tripwire Harlot Press, and selected as a 2020 Moving Arts MADLab Finalist.  Her short story, “A Profile,” was named a 49th New Millennium Writing Awards Finalist in 2020. Joanna holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and Masters in Playwriting from the University of Edinburgh. 

While in residence, Joanna looks forward to completing her next feature screenplay, which follows aging grandmother and caregiving granddaughter on a Northern California road-trip-in-a-day. 

Shuchi is a comics artist from San Francisco. She was born in India, spent her late twenties and early thirties in Germany working as a language and intercultural trainer, and moved to the United States in 2016. She attended California College of the Arts and graduated with an MFA in Comics in 2019. A former Resident Artist and Educator at Chapter 510, she currently runs and teaches her own comics and basic animation workshops for several school programs across the bay area (virtually in 2020-2021). Her curriculum focuses on visual storytelling, personal expression, and exploration through images and words. Her work is inspired by her personal experiences, science, nature, mythology and human behavior. 

While in-residence, Shuchi is working on a transnational graphic memoir based on her time in Stuttgart, Germany – a story of love, language, culture, and resilience. She is supported in these efforts by the House with editorial / story development mentorship, as well as support throughout her development of a book proposal. Since joining the House, she has taught classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art, started working on a collaborative graphic memoir with a NY-based journalist, and had their work published in the New Yorker for the first time.

Our 2021-2022 James Tolan Writer-in-Residence, Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of four chapbooks and one book of poetry, Slaughter the One Bird. Winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work was recently included in the 2020 New Poetry from the Midwestanthology, published annually by New American Press. Her writing and advocacy work are deeply focused on gender-based trauma, PTSD, and narrative therapy. She is an Assistant Professor of First-Year Writing at Michigan State University, where she has taught for six years, in-person and online. She has also taught first-year writing, junior composition, poetry, and literature at Alma College, New England College, and Oklahoma Baptist University. Kimberly is currently an associate editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and a reader for The Maine Review. 

While in residence, Kimberly will be tackling a new work of nonfiction focused on PTSD and the writing process. 

The 2022 Deborah Anne McNeely Writer-in-Residence, Jhani/JFK Randhawa is a queer* Kenyan-Punjabi/Anglo-American multidisciplinary maker and editor. Their multimedia and cross-genre work—whether through essay, video collage, performance, poetry, textile, or sculpture—explores disruption, hybridities, imperialism, and human entanglements. Their approach to making and collaboration is interdisciplinary, research-based, and process-oriented, exploring narratives of environmentalism, queer* identity, diaspora, madness, and death. They’ve had residencies at Upaya Zen Center (Santa Fe, NM), Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center (Muir Woods, CA), Wormfarm Institute (Reedsburg, Wisconsin), and Millay Colony for the Arts (Austerlitz, New York). And, in 2021, they were named a finalist for the PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship. They currently work as a Community Coordinator and programming assistant for a program built to support BIPOC and allied writers across genres through the completion of their book projects.  With Teo Rivera-Dundas, J is co-founder and co-editor of the experimental journal and print project, rivulet.

While in residence, they will continue working on their cross-genre writing, specifically grounded in their family's experience as retail, factory, farm, and government laborers in North India, Kenya, and the U.K.

A West Virginia native, she is a folklore enthusiast, and Appalachian tale-teller. Her work seeks to explore the complexities of class, poverty, and sexuality, often mixing melancholy with humor to present the most unflinchingly honest and immersive storytelling possible. She has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from West Virginia University, and has worked as an editor, a writing consultant, and most interestingly, a laundress at a haunted hotel. She currently serves as the Media and Marketing Coordinator for the Monongalia Arts Center, a regional arts center, and teaches creative writing class to youth.  When she's not writing unrequited love poems, you can probably find her marathon training, gossiping with her grandma, or unabashedly ordering two entrees for one at any given Waffle House.

While in-residence, she will focus on a collection of short stories and essays that tackles the complexities of growing up queer in Appalachia. Her work seeks to combat stereotypes categorizing Appalachia as a wasteland of ignorance, regressive policy, and self-imposed poverty. She is passionate about telling true stories of resiliency, complexity, and social and political struggle, as an anti-thesis to the literature that dominates the mainstream. Her stories embody Appalachian folklore and ancestral story-telling and are told from her perspective growing up in a rural town as a closeted queer child.

Ricky Tucker is a North Carolina native, storyteller, educator and art critic. His work explores the imprints of art and memory on narrative, and the absurdity of most fleeting moments. He has written for The Paris Review, The Tenth Magazine, and Public Seminar among others and performed for reading series including The Moth Grand SLAM, Sister Spit, Born: Free, and Spark London. He received his BA from The New School as a Riggio: Writing and Democracy scholar, and a Writer/Teacher MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2017 he was chosen as a LAMBDA Literary Emerging Writer Fellow for creative nonfiction. His book,  And the Category Is...: Inside New York's Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community will be released by Beacon Press in December 2021.

Throughout his residency, Ricky worked on revisions of his forthcoming book, and proposals and outlines for projects reflecting on the culture-shifting music genres Post-Punk and New Jack Swing. In this time, he also delved deeper into teaching his immersive collaborative narrative writing workshops as a means of archiving the sociopolitical desires of various collectives. And, he taught a class in partnership with Queers Write Pittsburgh. He embraced the opportunity for mentorship via the House to 1) develop more teaching opportunities, and 2) connect with and learn from writers in television or those who've adapted their work for television or film. 

Natalie Dalea is a midwestern mestiza writer and mud enthusiast. An Ohio transplant now residing in Chicago, she’s written about everything from bats to ballet.

Natalie has written science communications for the Field Museum and, this spring, started as a Curious City production intern with WBEZ. Two years of chemical engineering combined with her English degree have given her a passion for environmental justice. Her work explains how the natural world affects our embedded human communities. Her creative nonfiction has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and earned her a Hedgebrook Fellowship.

As a writer-out-of-residence with the Writers House, Natalie worked with two mentors: Maggie Messitt on professional goals (like securing a competitive 6-month internship with WBEZ) and with Adriana E. Ramirez on her manuscript-in-progress, an essay collection exploring multigenerational Mexican-American experiences in the rust belt. And, within that time, Natalie explored and applied to MFA programs. At the conclusion of her virtual residency, the Fall of 2021, Natalie started her MFA at the University of Minnesota as part of a unique incoming class of creative writers, all supported by the University's Creating Inclusive Cohorts program.

Sharon Lin is the author of Electric Heart, part of the 2021 Ghost City Press Micro-Chap Series. She is a 2021 Best New Poets nominee, the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference Dana Winn Scholar, a GrubStreet Emerging Writers Fellow semifinalist, a Fulbright Fellow, and a recipient of the Robert A. Boit Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, The Adroit Journal, Sine Theta, Bloomsbury, and elsewhere. She was the 2017 New York City Youth Poet Laureate and recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

As a Writer-out-of-Residence, she is working on a collection of essays that focus on the evolution and ethics of language and computing in the 21st century. Overall, her work tackles themes of human/inhuman, migratory identities, and the politics of queerness.

delmetria millener is a Louisiana-bred, Texas-fed storyteller and teacher. An internationally-published freelance journalist, delmetria is the founding director of #TeenWritersProject, a nonprofit writing organization that provides a collaborative and engaging space for teens to write and be published. Through this organization, delmetria seeks to improve the reading, writing, social, cultural and creative literacy of high school-age teens. Currently based in Bangkok, Thailand—a pandemic-move for employment and adventure—delmetria teaches English Literature, Creative Writing and Research to high school students, and is studying creative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

As a Writer-out-of-Residence, delmetria will work to grow #TWP’s programming and literary magazine, and continue work on her MFA thesis which explores the importance of how teaching Black literature can shape, or reshape, ideas of diversity, equity and inclusion in secondary and post-secondary classrooms, and beyond.