By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager
MCWC 2020 Update: We here at MCWC are closely monitoring the current situation around COVID-19. The health of both our participants and our community here on the Coast are of utmost importance to us. While we wait for more information over the coming weeks, we are looking into alternate options for MCWC 2020, including the possibility of holding the conference online. We will be in touch with more information closer to May/June, but for now, we are still taking registrations. In addition, we have decided to waive our cancellation fee this year for all registrants.
If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email us at info@mcwc.org. This is a very uncertain time for us all, and our thoughts are with the MCWC community.
We are thrilled to welcome this year’s scholarship winners to MCWC! The following writers were selected out of a highly competitive field of applicants. We asked them to tell us a little about their current project and/or what they hope to get out of their conference experience.
Scholarships strengthen the MCWC community by bringing in talented individuals who may not be able to attend otherwise. These opportunities would not be possible without the support of our generous donors. We cannot thank them enough!
BYERLEY MEMORIAL NOVEL SCHOLARSHIP
Antonia Angress was born in Los Angeles and raised in San José, Costa Rica. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Arts & Letters, Lunch Ticket, and more, and has been nominated for New Stories from the Midwest 2020. Her work has received awards, recognition, and support from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the Faulkner Society, and the Writers’ League of Texas. She’s a graduate of Brown University and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota, where she’s a College of Liberal Arts Graduate Fellow.
Antonia writes: “I’m working on a novel set in the art world during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I loved Julie Buntin’s Marlena and I’m looking forward to working with her on a chapter of my manuscript.”
DOUG FORTIER SHORT FICTION SCHOLARSHIP
Angie Sijun Lou is from Seattle and Shanghai. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the American Poetry Review, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow in Fiction and a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also teaches calculus and poetry at San Quentin State Prison.
Angie writes: “I will be working on a series of interlinked short stories that contend with the Asian American diaspora, rituals, suburbia, and capitalist realism.”
Founder’s Scholarship for Fiction Writers - Historical Fiction
Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer scribbling about race, colonization, and women who don’t toe the line. Her stories have appeared, or are forthcoming in Porter House Review, Atticus Review, Jezebel, Fiction Attic Press, Fiction Factory, Mekong Teahouse, Untapped Cities, and more. Her work was recently a finalist for the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize judged by Carmen Maria Machado. Vanessa is based in New York where she is an MFA candidate at The New School, after a ten-year career in public relations. She has a B.A. in Political Economy from UC Berkeley. You can find her at: https://twitter.com/vanjchan
Vanessa writes: “I am excited to work on my historical novel about three siblings trying to find humanity during the Japanese Occupation of Malaysia during WWII. I’m thrilled to be working with Susan Stinson and my fellow historical fiction writers—excavating from one’s own family and nation’s history is sensitive and challenging, and I hope to build the craft skills and the community to help me do this responsibly.”
GINNY RORBY MG/YA SCHOLARSHIP
Alicia London’s debut middle grade novel, Land of Sweet and Bitter, received first place for MG/YA in the 2019 MCWC Writing Contest. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two young daughters.
Alicia writes: “My novel is set in rural Bolivia where I lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for three years, and my characters face many of the difficulties I witnessed while living there. I am interested in sharing unfamiliar worlds and perspectives with middle grade readers.”
Hether Ludwick First Taste Scholarship
Gerardo Pacheco Matus is a Mayan Native and recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, The Frost Place, Macondo and the Miami Writers’ Institute. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared and are forthcoming from the Grantmakers in the Arts, Apricity Press, Amistad Howard-University, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, The Packinghouse Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Branch Wired, Four Way Review, The Cortland Review, Nashville Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Memorious Magazine, Tin House Magazine, Play on Words, and in the first CantoMundo folios at Anomaly Press.
Gerardo writes: “One of the many positive outcomes from participating at MCWC 2020 is to be able to have time and space to revise and write new poems. In addition, I am super excited to be part of the intimate and interactive writing workshops, and I believe that I will be able to write new poems as a result.”
MCWC POETRY SCHOLARSHIP
Janferie Stone has been a resident of the Mendocino Coast for many years. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript, two short stories and a novel/memoir about Communal living and marijuana cultivation in the Emerald Triangle. Previous publications include essays in and co-editing of West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (2012) and stories and poetry in the Chicago Quarterly and Canary.
Janferie writes: “I looks forward to MCWC for feedback on the Commune project, inspiration and focus.”
NORMA WATKINS MEMOIR SCHOLARSHIP
Olivia Won is a writer, producer, and plant-tender living in her hometown of Oakland, California. She currently works at KQED, where she writes about Bay Area food culture and produces the long-running television program Check, Please! Bay Area. She’s obsessed with female desire, the Hulu show PEN15, Jenny Odell, and winter kishus.
Olivia writes: “I am currently working on novel about my relationship with my halmoni that explores food as a love language and a medium for building intergenerational resilience in the face of diasporic traumas.”
Soroptimists International of Fort Bragg Nonfiction Scholarship
Kailyn McCord writes fiction and nonfiction in Oakland, California, her hometown by way of Oregon, Alaska, and New Orleans. Her work has been shortlisted at Glimmer Train and has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Brevity, The Believer, and The Rumpus. She holds a BA from Reed College and an MFA from the University of New Orleans, where she was the editor of Bayou Magazine. Kailyn has received support from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Ucross Foundation, and now, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. When not writing, Kailyn likes a good camping trip.
Kailyn writes: “My current project is a history of fire in Oakland, California, centering around my childhood home, which so far, has survived. It’s an experiment in memory and disaster narrative, and what nonfiction as a genre can do. I’m looking forward to critiquing it’s beginning in Julie Buntin’s class, and also spending some time at the ocean.”
Terry Connelly Scholarship for a First Time Participant
M. Thomas Gammarino is the author of the novels King of the Worlds and Big in Japan, and the novella Jellyfish Dreams. Shorter works have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Writer, The New York Review of Science Fiction, The New York Tyrant, and The Hawai’i Review (among others), and he received the 2013 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Hawai’i’s highest literary honor. He teaches literature and creative writing at Punahou School in Honolulu.
Tom writes: “I love science fiction and have been teaching and writing it for many years, though all of my schooling was focused on literary fiction (which I also love). I’m looking forward to working with Kij Johnson, unapologetically, on genre stuff.”
Voices of Diversity Scholarship
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel Bestiary is forthcoming in September 2020. She lives in New York.
K-Ming writes: “I’m working on a collection of magical-realist short stories about Chinese and Taiwanese-American girls in California. I’m excited to connect with the community and be inspired by everyone’s work.”
Voices of Diversity Scholarship
Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea for Field of Mosquitoes, her novel about ghosts in Korean folklore. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in PANK Magazine, Maudlin House, and The Rumpus.
Kat writes: “I am currently working on a novel about a Black film student in South Korea who sees ghosts after a near-death experience. Julie Buntin’s work has had such an important influence on my own writing, and I look forward to workshopping the first chapter of my novel in her class.”
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT WRITER SCHOLARSHIPS
Gracelin Gorman is a sixteen-year-old lover of the arts and aspiring creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction writer.
Gracelin writes: “At the conference, I hope to be exposed to all different genres of writing, learn how to improve my work, and meet people who are both similar to me and extremely different from me.”
If you would like to join the scholarship winners at MCWC 2020, you can register now at mcwc.org. If you would like to support our scholarship program, please consider donating to MCWC at mcwc.org/donate.