Kettle Pond Writers' Conference

2023 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. Her resume outside the writing world includes work at a little league snack bar, weighing trucks, packing produce, refereeing flag football, reading mail for the ACLU, landscaping, guarding a children’s 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 grateful to this community of writers and friends, for the opportunity to write again in their company and, always, for the incredible, often invisible, life-changing work of everyone listed below for creating the 2023 Residency, and all that came before it.

Thank you, KP Crew.

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.

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.

Ashley Mayne

Staff & Faculty 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.

Z Bell

Z Bell is a Poet, Music Artist and Radical Educator. He’s published a handful of pieces across a few different journals, including So to Speak Journal as well as Black Youth Project and Lucky Jefferson to name a few. Most recently, Z released his first rap album called “NEW L!FE” which is available on all music-streaming platforms. As an Educator, Z has over a decade of Facilitation, Training and curriculum-building experience. He believes in the power of transformative justice and liberatory action as a stance against oppression. He knows that Healing Matters and for Z, joy is an active intention. Z is Very Black, very queer, transMasculine, neurodivergent and chronically ill. He’s as witty as he is unapologetically awkward. Mom & Grandma (rest in power) ain’t raised no fool. Z lives in The Bronx with seven speakers, three rolling trays and one parkour cat.

Andy Tran

Andy Tran is a writer living in Virginia. He has graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a degree in English.

Find his work here.

STAFF ALUMS

Kevin Bertolero

Founding Staff & Associate Director (2019-2023)

Now Kettle Pond Faculty! (2024)

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.

Katie Rice

Founding Staff & Associate Director (2019)

Katie Rice is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has an MFA from the University of Virginia. You can find her writing in Bon Appetit, Food52, and on her website.

Kim Bell (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, living with cancer — and representations of the same in film and television — through a comedic lens.

Deirdre Coyle

<3 (2019) & (TBD...)

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.

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 millennial drama". He was a member of the inaugural Kettle Pond staff, where he will always be greatly missed.

Nicole Roché (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.