PREVIOUS KETTLE POND FACULTY, READERS, & SPEAKERS
Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the short story collection The Price of the Haircut, and has won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, and a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His eighth book—the novel I Am Calvin Bledsoe—was published in September 2019. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.
Jaed Coffin is the author of Roughhouse Friday (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), a memoir about the year he won the middleweight title of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. He's also the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo, 2008), which chronicles the summer he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother's village in Thailand. A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, Jaed's essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Nautilus, The Sun and many other journals and publications. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters. For more information visit www.jaedcoffin.com.
Nicole Counts is an associate editor at One World, an imprint of Random House with the mission of providing a home for authors—novelists, essayists, memoirists, poets, journalists, thinkers and activists—who seek to challenge the status quo. She has worked with Fatimah Asghar, Morgan Parker, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Donovan X. Ramsey, Danielle Geller, Haroon Ullah, Mychal Denzel Smith, Lisa Shannon, Ryan Berg, and others. Nicole Counts started her career in marketing and publicity at PublicAffairs and Nation Books. She is a freelance writer, as well as a facilitator and mentor with Girls Write Now, on the board of Well-Read Black girl, a mentor with Representation Matters Mentorship Program, and a member of POC in publishing. A Jersey native and Philly lover, she lives in Brooklyn.
Brandon Courtney is a veteran of the United States Navy and the author of This, Sisyphus (YesYes Books, 2019), Rooms for Rent in the Burning City (Spark Wheel Press, 2015), The Grief Muscles (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), and the chapbook, Inadequate Grave (YesYes Books, 2016). He has received fellowships and scholarships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Colgate University, Juniper Summer Writers’ Institute, and Seaside Writers’ Conference. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Tin House, Boston Review, Guernica, Memorious, The Progressive, and American Literary Review.
Kerry D’Agostino is a literary agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Bowdoin College, her masters in Art in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her certificate in publishing from the Columbia Journalism School. She started at Curtis Brown in 2011 as assistant to Tim Knowlton and Holly Frederick in the Film and Television Department. After some time as a film and audio rights associate, she also began assisting Peter Ginsberg. In addition to her continued work with Peter, Kerry now represents authors of literary and commercial fiction, and select narrative nonfiction. Above all, she is drawn to work that either introduces her to someone, somewhere, or something new, or makes her see something old in a new way.
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Jaclyn Gilbert is a literary agent at Cullen Stanley International and the author of the debut novel Late Air (Little A, 2018). Jaclyn received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Yale University. She is the recipient of a research fellowship from the New York Public Library, a contributor to the Bread Loaf, Colgate, and Tin House Writers' Conferences, and her short stories and essays have appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Lit Hub, Long Reads, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.
Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else (Holt Paperbacks, 2018) and the chapbook Pity the Animal (Emily Books, 2014). She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Catapult in New York and at Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy.
Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill (Penguin Books, 2015). The novel was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was also named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was the winner of Late Night Library's 2016 Debut-litzer Prize. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her work has appeared in publications including Tin House, brilliant corners, Obsidian, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Writer.
Sandra Lim is is the author of three poetry collections, The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021),The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014) and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her poems and essays have been published in anthologies including The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Knopf, 2016) and The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleaides Press, 2017). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Jentel Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
David Ryan is the author of the story collection Animals in Motion and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His fiction is forthcoming, or has appeared, in Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Review, Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Electric Literature, No Tokens, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, the Mississippi Review, and elsewhere, and anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. Essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low residency program at New England College.
Michael J. Seidlinger is a Filipino American author of a number of books including My Pet Serial Killer and The Fun We’ve Had. He serves as Library and Academic Marketing Manager at Melville House, Editor-at-Large for Electric Literature, and is a member of The Accomplices. In 2012, he founded Civil Coping Mechanisms, an independent press specializing in poetry, hybrid-form fiction and nonfiction. His writing has appeared in Buzzfeed, Forbes, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, PANK, Hypable, and elsewhere. He has taught classes for Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon Writers Workshop, and Catapult. A graduate of George Washington University’s Masters of Business in Publishing program, he lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he never sleeps and is forever searching for the next best cup of coffee. You can find him online on Facebook, Twitter (@mjseidlinger), and Instagram (@michaelseidlinger).
Raena Shirali is a poet, teaching artist, and editor from Charleston, South Carolina. Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, she is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. Shirali’s poems & reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Blackbird, Diode, The Nation, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch, & elsewhere. She recently co-organized We (Too) Are Philly, a summer poetry festival highlighting voices of color, and is currently an organizer for Blue Stoop. Shirali is also a Poetry Editor for Muzzle Magazine and a Poetry Reader for Vinyl.