2025 Willa Cather Residency Cohort Announced
The National Willa Cather Center is pleased to announce members of the third cohort of writers of the Willa Cather Writers Residency in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The cohort of five women writers will gather October 5-19, 2025. The Willa Cather Residency aims to inspire new work by emergent writers.
MFC Feeley
MFC Feeley is a fiction writer living in Fairbanks, Alaska. She enjoys stripping classic narratives of their orthodoxy and wrote a series of ten stories inspired by the Bill of Rights for Ghost Parachute. Feeley has published in Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Pulp Literature, and others. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska.
Carolyn Holthoff
Carolyn Holthoff is a mom, historian, and archaeologist who writes eco-fiction and woman-centered fiction under the pen name Lena Hari. Her short stories have appeared in various literary journals, and her work has been supported by Hedgebrook. She writes from the Pacific Northwest and is a pending graduate (2025) of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at PLU.
Lynne Nugent
Lynne Nugent holds an MFA in nonfiction writing and a PhD in English from the University of Iowa. Her chapbook of essays on new motherhood, Nest, won the 2019 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award and was published by The Florida Review in 2020. She serves as editor-in-chief of The Iowa Review.
Angela H. Sievers
Angela H. Sievers is a poet, farmwife, mom, editor, and co-founder of FarmGirl Press. Her poetry has been published in Nebraska Life and in a chapbook, Fencelines (2022). Her writing is deeply rooted at the crossroads of geographical place and the search for identity. She draws strength and tenacity from the Nebraska landscape and finds healing among cottonwoods and brome.
Allison Strauss
Allison Strauss is a creative nonfiction writer and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her writing and art have appeared in Artillery, Citric Acid, Exposition Review, L.A. Photo Curator, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Museum of Americana, and The Portland Mercury, among others. She looks forward to working on The L.A. Women’s Address Book, a biographical collection, in Cather country.