Resident Fellows 2011-2012

Robert Lee is a poet, novelist, and essayist from Missoula, Montana. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. His humorous, epistolary novel, Guiding Elliott, was published by Lyon’s Press in 1997. His work has been published in the anthologies Poems Across the Big Sky and New Montana Stories, and in Montana Magazine as well as in many small presses. His essay “Midsummer Musings“ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Robert teaches writing in grade schools and high schools with the Missoula Writing Collaborative, and he is a writing tutor at the University of Montana. His outreach placements with MWC include two years in Arlee, Montana on the Flathead Reservation and three month-long residencies (2008-2010) in Hydaburg, Alaska. His love affair with Alaska began with his first visit (to Fairbanks) in 1969, and he is particularly enamored of South East. He is excited to write and to engage with community members during his first visit to Sitka.

Find out more on Robert's page.

Golden is a poet and fisherman from Washington State. She spent the summer of 2012 working on F/V Challenger, seining for salmon in Southeast Alaska. Sierra has spent time living or traveling in Alaska, North Carolina, Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. Her writing focuses on natural environments, small towns, and work, especially that of the commercial fishing industry in Southeast Alaska.

She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, and her literary honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Susan C. Boynton Poetry Prize. Her work can be seen in Coldflashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska, Cirque, Fourth River, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. In addition to her work as a writer and fisherman, she is the poetry editor for Raleigh Review.

Cedar Marie holds an MFA in visual art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her creative work is inspired by people who work on the water and investigates the cultural shifts of small fishing communities. Pairing research and writing with art production to extend the range of her creative practice, she often combines writing with documentary photography and hand crafted objects from fishing culture to tell a story about the preservation of cultural traditions through living experiences. Commercial fishing informs her creative practice, and her art is intimately tied to expressing the conditions in which people live and work.

A recent recipient of both an Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC) Creative Arts Fellowship and an Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship, Marie is currently curating the international art exhibition FISH for the University of Oklahoma School of Art where she also teaches. Her work has been cited in numerous publications including Slate Magazine and the College Art Association's Art Journal, and is included in the forthcoming anthology Re/Theorizing Writing Histories of Rhetoric edited by Michelle Ballif (Southern Illinois University Press, fall 2012). She is originally from the “land of 10,000 lakes.”

During her residency, she will work on her first book project: Women of the Fleet: Fishing for Resiliency in Sitka, Alaska.