Now in its eleventh year, Adirondack Center for Writing’s (ACW) 2024 Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency will take place from September 22 to October 6 at the Lodge on Twitchell Lake near Big Moose, NY.

Each fall, ACW offers a free two-week residency to six poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers – three from the Adirondack region and three from anywhere around the world. The writers selected this year include Stephanie Dinsae, Bryn Durgin, Sabrina Jones, Matthew Keating, Sean Prentiss, and Erin Kate Ryan.

“Since 2014, we have welcomed over 60 writers to the lake where Anne LaBastille built her cabin and wrote her beloved ‘Woodswoman’ series,” said ACW’s Executive Director Nathalie Thill. “Our residents enjoy two weeks of unfettered writing, reading, researching, and relaxation time. We are thrilled to announce the next six residents who stood out among a poll of hundreds of applications.”

The residency is generously provided by the estate of Anne LaBastille, who wrote books capturing challenges of the region, including Woodswoman and Beyond Black Bear Lake from her cabin on Twitchell Lake.

More information about the Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency and this year’s residents can be found on ACW’s website at adirondackcenterforwriting.org/residency and adirondackcenterforwriting.org/announcing-our-2024-anne-labastille-residents.

The Adirondack Center for Writing has been bringing people and words together for 25 years through provocative events and meaningful programs. For more information about ACW, visit adirondackcenterforwriting.org or follow @adkctr4writing on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

2024 resident bios

Sean Prentiss is author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave – which won the National Outdoor Book Award, Utah Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award – and the author of Crosscut: Poems. He is the series editor for the Bloomsbury Writers Guide and Anthologies Series. Two books, Environmental and Nature Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction are written by Prentiss. Prentiss is co-editor of The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction. He and his family live on a small lake in northern Vermont. He serves as an associate professor at Norwich University. Learn more at seanprentiss.com.

Sabrina Jones creates comics and graphic novels on social justice and radical history. Her books include Race to Incarcerate, and Our Lady of Birth Control: A Cartoonist’s Encounter with Margaret Sanger. She has created graphic biographies of Isadora Duncan, Jane Jacobs, Walt Whitman, FDR, and Jesus. She began cartooning in the political comics magazine World War 3 Illustrated, and has continued to edit and contribute to many issues, including the latest, My Body/Our Rights. Sabrina paints scenery for film, theater and television as a member of United Scenic Artists 829. She divides her time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, NY.

A poet and Black Classicist from the Bronx, Stephanie Dinsae is a 2019 Smith College graduate and has received an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Stephanie often writes poetry about myth as it relates to Blackness and her own life, friendship, video games and the flexibility/fallibility of memory. Her favorite things to do are dance around to music and obsess over astrology. In case you were wondering, Stephanie has major Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius placements.

A writer and humorist living in Sarasota, FL., Bryn Durgin is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, whose work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times. She is the Director of Programming for an independent bookstore where she runs the popular Banned Book Club (which is no laughing matter). A certified Master Gardener and a Blue Butterfly Family Grief Program volunteer, she is also a Featured Storyteller with The Moth’s Mainstage.

Matthew Keating writes fiction and poetry, and his first artistic training was in music. He is a reader for The Paris Review and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space. In writing, phenomenology and the beauty of language as a medium are his primary and relentless obsessions. He lives in rural upstate New York.

Erin Kate Ryan is a queer writer who has worked as a seamstress, a window painter, a lawyer, a hat-bander and a movie theater usher. Her novel Quantum Girl Theory was published in 2022 (Random House). Erin Kate’s fiction has appeared in VQR, The Normal School, Conjunctions and Glimmer Train, among others. She’s received grants and fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the James Jones Society, the Minnesota Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, VSC, VCCA and Millay Arts. She holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. Her toothbrush was once exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.