Jodi Paloni

2023 Winter Artist-In-Residence

Jodi Paloni is the author of the linked story collection, They Could Live With Themselves (Press 53), runner-up for the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, an Independent Publishers Silver Medalist, and a finalist for the Maine Book Award. Her short works appear in Maine Décor, Art New England, Green Mountains Review, Carve Magazine, Contrary, Literary Mama, Whitefish Review, and many other places, and have been anthologized in North by Northeast I, North by Northeast II, and Short Story America: Volume IV. She won the Short Story America Prize, was runner-up for the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and was two times a finalist for the Maine Writers Short Works Competition. 

Jodi has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon Review Summer Writers’ Workshop, a Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Monson Arts Literary Writing Fellow, and a Joseph A. Fiore Center Literary Arts Resident. She has an MS in Environmental Studies from Antioch New England Graduate School and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the founder of Maine Coast Writers Workshops and Retreats where she leads generative writing salons and word and image workshops in the Gateless Writing Method online and in person in Midcoast Maine. She is a freelance editor and book coach. Her passion as a creativity coach is to empower and support women to find and execute a vision for their creative hopes and dreams. She lives in Pemaquid where she is currently at work on her next book of fiction.

Nancy Hauswald

2023 Spring Artist-In-Residence

Nancy’s life has taken multiple tacks since receiving her undergraduate degree fifty years ago. From 1985 to 1994, she and her now late husband lived and cruised full-time aboard sailboats, migrating with the seasons between the Bahamas and Maine. During that time, Nancy’s writing about their life at sea was published in national nautical magazines (Cruising World, Sail, WoodenBoat, Coastal Cruising) and the British periodical Yachting. Her non-nautical essays have appeared The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. 

After moving ashore, Nancy served as a freelance editor for the nautical division of McGraw-Hill and, for two years, wrote a monthly column on books, bookstores, and authors for a weekly Maine newspaper. Her lifelong penchant for travel influenced her decision to next create a business that specialized in crafting educational programs at sea. After a twelve-year run, she closed her company and, in 2012, joined the staff of Left Bank Books in Belfast, an independent bookshop where she is both the manager and publicist. Her beloved Labradoodle, Banjo, is the Director of Canine Relations at the shop.

In June 2022, Nancy fulfilled a decades-long dream and received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. While a student there, she served for one year as the nonfiction editor of the Stonecoast Review, the program’s literary magazine. She’s now writing a book about her experiences at sea as well as articles and essays covering an eclectic assortment of subjects from learning how to be a widow, seasickness, saddle shoes, and the art of bookselling.