2019 Fellows

Genevieve Arlie

Genevieve Arlie (she/they) is a tree hugger & dog lover from California. A former Iowa Arts Fellow in translation, she's now a PhD student in English–creative writing and Presidential Fellow at the University of Georgia. Her recent work appears in the Beyond Resilience folio of Nat. Brut and is forthcoming in Passages North.

Stephanie Heit

Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space in Michigan. She is a shock/psych system survivor, bipolar, and a member of Olimpias, a disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the forthcoming hybrid memoir poem Psych Murders (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017). Visit her website here.

Image Description: headshot of a white woman smiling, wearing a purple wrap, with brown wavy hair in a bob. She is on (perhaps in, feet dangling) the Huron River with background muted green of tree leaves, and dappled light before dusk. 

Stephen Lightbrown

Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, Stephen Lightbown is a spoken word artist who’s performed at the Everyman Theatre in in Liverpool and the Poetry Café and Rich Mix in London. In March 2019, Stephen’s first collection, Only Air, was published by Burning Eye Books.

Raymond Luczak

Raymond Luczak (he/him) is the author and editor of 25 titles, including once upon a twin: poems (Gallaudet University Press), Flannelwood (Red Hen Press), and Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories (Modern History Press). His work has appeared in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A playwright, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Image description: In the black-and-white photograph, a white middle-aged bearded man in a white button shirt stands in front of a wall that is lined with medium-sized squares as he looks pensively off to the sunlight outside of the frame.

Naomi Ortiz

Naomi Ortiz (they/them, she/her) is a writer, poet, facilitator and visual artist whose work focuses on self-care for activists, disability justice and living in multiple worlds (intersectionality). Her book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice invites readers to balance activism with self-care by guiding readers to sink into metaphor and examine their relationship to self, community and place.

MARGARET RICKETTS (1969-2021)

Margaret Ricketts has received grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has studied poetry with Marie Howe, Nikky Finney, Jacqueline Woodson, Marya Hornbacher and Cornelius Eady, among others. She is a fourteen year volunteer with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, working on issues of economic, social and environmental justice.

Jessica Suzanne Stokes

Jessica Suzanne Stokes is a disabled poet/performer/scholar currently pursuing her PhD in English at Michigan State University. Jessica is refining the work of her Erasure Cycle. She crafts poems by cutting or covering up medical and literary texts, reshaping them and being reshaped by them. Her academic research focuses on scars, the temporality of performance, and coalitional access.

Zoe Stoller

Zoe Stoller (they/them, she/her) is an award-winning writer, educator, and speaker based in Philadelphia and New York City. She creates educational content about the LGBTQ+ and mental health communities, as well as shares her stories of self-discovery, to spread visibility and inspire others to be their fullest, most authentic selves. Zoe is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Social Work at Bryn Mawr College.

Elizabeth Theriot

Elizabeth Theriot is a queer Southern writer with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. She earned her MFA from The University of Alabama and is writing a memoir about disability and desire. She is a first year Zoeglossia Fellow and a former teaching fellow with the nonprofit Desert Island Supply Company. You can find her work in The Rumpus, Yemassee, Barely South Review, the tiny, Winter Tangerine, A VELVET GIANT, and others. She lives in Birmingham, AL. Her website is here.

Gaia Thomas

Gaia Thomas is a disabled poet from the Bay Area. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in several collections and magazines such as The Scores and Concision. She likes to collaborate with her Zoeglossia fellows in the endeavor to find beauty in brutality and vice versa. 

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Viktoria Valenzuela

Viktoria Valenzuela (she/her) is the mother to six children and a Master's of English Literature, Creative Writing and Social Justice graduate student at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. She is also an inaugural Zoeglossia Fellow, a Macondista, and the organizer of 100 Thousand Poets for Change: San Antonio. Her work has been published in such collections as Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Wordgathering, The Zoeglossia Anthology: We Are Not Your Metaphor, Poetry Bay Online Journal, and Mutha Magazine. She is married to the poet Vincent Cooper.