Kettle Pond Writers' Conference

KETTLE POND STAFF

Virginia Zech, Director

Before founding Kettle Pond, Virginia worked for a writers’ conference in upstate New York for ten years. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana. Virginia’s resume outside the writing world includes work at a little league snack bar, weighing trucks on a farm, packing corn, refereeing flag football, as a letter reader for the ACLU of Washington State, organic landscaping, guarding a children’s leukemia drug manufacturer, ski patrol at a Class A avalanche resort, Head Intern at The Onion in the MySpace era, and as a bartender. She is looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and finding the time to write something at the 2023 Residency.

Kevin Bertolero, Founding Staff & Associate Director

Kevin Bertolero is the founding editor of Ghost City Press. He holds degrees in literature from Potsdam College and the University of New Hampshire, as well as an MFA from New England College. Kevin is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Love Poems (Bottlecap Press, 2020), as well as a nonfiction book on gay cinema, Forever in Transition: Queer Futurist Aesthetics in Gay Cinema (Another New Calligraphy, 2021). Kevin is also the editor of & Change. His work has appeared in Post Road, Blueline Magazine, Olney Mag, Fourteen Poems, Malasaña, and elsewhere. He lives in New Hampshire.

Jack Bachmann, Associate Director

Jack Bachmann lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of two chapbooks, Dayglo and Soft Static Crushes. His work has appeared in Mold, ÖMËGÄ, and micro/MACRO. He is an editor at Ghost City Press. Jack likes good poems, good times, and short bios.

A. Harding, Founding Staff & Deputy Director

A. Harding is currently on the faculty at a girls' boarding school, where she teaches everything from classics to contemporary novels. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Cornell University, specializing in 20th Century Fiction & Architecture. She previously worked for the Colgate Writers' Conference for nine years.

Ashley Mayne, Staff & Lecturer

Ashley Mayne's work has appeared in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Northwest Review, Peripheries, Blight Podcast, Metambesen, and elsewhere. She is the author of novels Mankiller (2014 Dr. Cicero Books), and Tiger (2015) edits fiction for Fence, curates two reading series in the Hudson Valley, and works on an organic farm.

Deirdre Coyle, Staff (2019) & TBD (2023)

Deirdre Coyle's fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The New Republic, The Texas Observer, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Kerouac Project, and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Her column, "This Mortal Coyle," appears monthly in Unwinnable, and she works as a Digital Producer at Publishers Weekly. Originally published by Electric Literature, her essay, “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me,” was named one of the Best Stories by Women in 2017 by Bustle and translated into Italian for Corriere della Sera.

Kim Bell, Staff (2019)

Kim Bell is a native of the South Shore of Massachusetts who currently lives, works, and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana, where she taught writing and was the Nonfiction Editor at CutBank. Previously, Kim wrote about beer for The Lowlands Group in Milwaukee, and ran classes on all things beer-related: from pairings, to how the magic of fermentation led to the first human civilizations. She has been writing for Looper.com since the summer of 2021 and is at work on a collection of illustrated essays that explore grief, mortality, and living with cancer — and their representations in film and television — through a comedic lens.

Katie Rice, Associate Director (2019)

Katie Rice is currently a candidate in the University of Virginia MFA program. Before moving south of the Mason-Dixon line, she grew up in Ohio, earned a BA from Colgate University and worked in the marketing departments of both Random House and Knopf in New York. She received the Balch Prize for best short story by a graduate student at UVa in 2018. That same year, she was selected to be a resident at Pocoapoco in Oaxaca, Mexico. Katie has received support from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where she was in the last class of work-study scholars. She is currently at work on a novel.

Nicole Roché, Staff (2019)

Nicole Roché is a writer, reporter, and self-archivist currently based in northern New York. She has taught writing and literature at the University of Kansas, where she earned her B.A. in journalism and an M.A. in English Literature/Creative Writing, and at the University of Montana, where she earned her M.F.A. in Fiction in 2017, and where she worked as a fiction editor and online managing editor for CutBank. She now teaches classes on storytelling and identity at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where she is also a writer and editor for Weave News.

Will Georges (In Memoriam)

Will Georges is the author of It’s You I Like, published posthumously by a group of writers affiliated with the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University, where he was an MFA candidate in poetry. His interests included, "surrealism and millenial drama." He was a member of the inaugural Kettle Pond staff, where he will always be greatly missed.