Past Milton Center Fellows

Click here for a fellowship application.

2006-2007
Jessica Murphy (Catholic) spent her fellowship time striving to finish her first novel. She regularly interviews authors for The Atlantic Online, and her writing has appeared in Memorious, Poets & Writers Magazine, and The New York Sun. Aside from the years she worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly, she has been teaching since 1996. Her teaching positions have taken her from Micronesia, where she was a member of the Jesuit Volunteers International; to Cambridge, MA, where she was a teaching fellow under Dr. Robert Coles at Harvard University, and Boston, where she taught writing and rhetoric at Emerson College and Boston University; to Oxford and Tuscany, where she taught creative writing to high school students.

2005-2006
Laura Bramon Good (Baptist/Episcopalian) used her fellowship time to develop a collection of short stories. Laura has also contributed production and research to documentaries and educational television shows. As a consultant to international aid initiatives serving sexually exploited persons, she has lived and worked in Bolivia, Thailand, Nepal, and India. Her domestic activism interests center on women, children, and quality, community-based childcare as a means to social justice. Laura has been published in Regeneration Quarterly and recognized by Glimmer Train as an outstanding new writer.

2004-2005
Linda Wendling (Mennonite) expanded her story “Inappropriate Babies”—which was singled out in reviews of New Stories for the South in Entertainment Weekly, Southern Living, the Dallas Times and The Southerner—into a novel during her year at the Milton Center, which was also the Center's inaugural year in Seattle. Wendling is a Best New Writers of the South winner, a Ploughshares Emerging Writers nominee, and a finalist for the William Faulkner Prize for the Novel, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and the Bellwether Prize for the Novel. She has won the Heartland Fiction Prize and was a finalist for Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops Anthology and the AWP Writers Award. Her stories and novel excerpts have appeared in River Styx, Microfiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories (W. W. Norton) and New Stories from The South: The Year's Best (Algonquin Press).

2002-2003
Katherine Barrier (nondenominational) holds a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wichita State University. A native of Kansas, she serves as adjunct professor of English at a number of local colleges and universities. She has published poetry in The Berkley Poetry Review and Mikrokosmos and is currently completing her creative nonfiction book entitled Fat Girl in Paradise.

2002-2003
Virginia Smith (Catholic), a native of Albany, NY, earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia University in 1995. She has since worked as an editor, researcher, and writer at several news organizations including Reuters, Newsweek, ABC News, and The New York Observer. In 1998-1999 she was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and in 2001 she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers.

2001-2002
Ryan Witt (Catholic) has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho at Moscow. His poems cluster around the idea of falling from grace. He is a former managing editor of Fugue and has taught at Idaho State University. His poetry and fiction have been published in Barrow Street and Fugue.

2001-2002
Zoe Mullery (Non-denominational) received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches fiction workshops at San Quentin State Prison and has edited several prison anthologies. She lives in community at Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco's Mission District.

2000-2001
Michelle Roop (Methodist) came to the Milton Center with an M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Arizona-Tucson. While a Milton Center Fellow, Roop worked on a manuscript Elegy to Whatever Happens under the mentorship of poet Brenda Hillman.

2000-2001
Cindy Slates (Methodist) has an M.A. in English from the University of California-Davis. Under mentor Janet Peery, Slates re-structured her novel (as yet unnamed) about a deaf Finnish woman who uses images from the Bible and the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic) to find connection to the world.

1999-2000
John Jenkinson (Presbyterian), a Wichita resident, received an M.F.A. from Wichita State University and a Ph.D. in Contemporary Literature and Poetry Writing from the University of North Texas. His work, described as "lyric and dynamic, challenging as well as spiritual," has been published in American Literary Review, The Georgia Review, and Mid-American Review. During his fellowship, Jenkinson completed his first full-length collection of poetry, South of Red-Wing. Jenkinson has a chapbook coming out titled The History of Sleep. His poem "Grandfather's Republic" was accepted by Raintown Review, "Shapes" by The Ledge, "Watching the Invisible Man" by Portland Review, and "Two in the Bush" by Visions. He teaches English Composition and Creative writing at Butler Community College.

1999-2000
Lise Goett (Catholic), came to the Milton Center with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University as well as a Masters in English from New York University. Goett has been an artist-in-residence in Poetry and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her poetry has been published in The Paris Review and Ploughshares. Goett's awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, the 1995 Paris Review Discovery Prize, and the James D. Phelan Award in Literature from the Francisco Foundation. During her postgraduate fellowship at the Milton Center, Goett completed her manuscript, Waiting for the Paraclete, which won the 2001 Barnard Women Prize and was published by Beacon Press in 2002.

1998-1999
Christina Jensen (Catholic), a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Michigan, came to the Milton Center from Minden, Nebraska. Her project as a fellow was to work on her first novel, Ghostwriting, which looks at marriage through the reversing prism of a Catholic Church annulment application. She has published short stories and nonfiction in Prairie Schooner, THEMA, True West and Herb Quarterly. Jensen has received recognition in Florida State University's World's Best Short Story Competition and received a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction and a Constance Saltonsall Fellowship. She lives with her husband, Dr. Peter Jensen, in Rochester, New York.

1997-1998
Stephen Frech (Catholic), a native of Chicago, interrupted his Ph.D. study at the University of Cincinnati to be our first poetry fellow. His chapbook, Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent, won the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Award from Kent State University. While at the Milton Center he completed his collection of poems, If Not for These Wrinkles of Darkness: Rembrandt, a Self-Portrait. His manuscript won the White Pine Poetry Prize and was published in April 2001.

1997-1998
Mary Saionz (Catholic), a native of Brooklyn, New York, has been a competitive ballroom dancer and a teacher in Harlem. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, Saionz used her time as a Milton Fellow to work on her first novel, The Blessed Virgin of Elmhurst. Following her fellowship, Saionz returned to New York, where she worked as the Manager of Corporate Relations for the New York Botanical Gardens, using fundraising skills she acquired at the Milton Center. She is married to Sam Shaffer of New York and continues to work on her novel.

1996-1997
Naomi Hirahara (Baptist), a graduate of Stanford, left her job at The Rafu Shimpo, a Japanese-language newspaper in Los Angeles, to come to the Milton Center. She spent her time as a fellow working on her first novel, Summer of the Big Bachi (2004), the first novel in the Mas Arai mystery series, which draws on her father's experiences as Hiroshima survivor. The third book in the series, Snakeskin Shamisen, won the Mystery Writers of America's 2007 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of Best Paperback Original. Hirahara was also commissioned by the Japanese American National Museum to write An American Son (2001) a biography of George Aratani, the founder of Mikasa and Kenwood and is currently working as a freelance writer and publicist in Los Angeles. She is represented by Sonia Pabley of Rosenstone/Wender in New York. Naomi also edited Greenmakers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California.

For more information on Hirahara or her books, visit her website .

1996-1997
Jerome Stueart (Baptist), the son of a West Texas Baptist minister, is a graduate of Hardin Simmons University and received an M.F.A. at the University of Missouri. Having already published a comic book about polar bears, Stueart continued this theme at the Milton Center, working on a novel called Polar Extremes. While in Wichita, he taught at both Newman University and Friends University and served as Assistant Pastor at University Friends Church. He also participated in the Shakespeare in the Park's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Stueart is currently working on a Ph.D. in creative writing with Walter MacDonald at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where he was selected Outstanding Doctoral Student last year. Stueart received a Fulbright Award to study polar bears in the newly created territory of Nunavut in Iqaluit, Canada. He will use his research for two different books, one of which is Polar Extremes.

1995-1996
Caroline Langston (Greek Orthodox) worked on her first novel, The End of History, during her time as a Milton Fellow. She has published stories in Sonora Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares and Algonquin's Best Short Stories of the American South. Langston was awarded the prestigious Pushcart Prize and was also a 1997 Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has been writer-in-residence at both the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Rosehill College in South Carolina. Langston is married and lives in Arlington, VA, where she works as a development assistant at NPR.

1995-1996
Jeremy Nafziger (Mennonite) is a graduate of Eastern Mennonite College and a former award-winning news reporter. While in Wichita, Nafziger completed his first novel, The Birds That Stay, and sang in the Wichita Symphony Chorus. After completing his fellowship, Nafziger returned to Virginia, where he completed his M.A. in linguistics at George Mason University. He is working on his second novel, set in his native Shenandoah Valley. He has edited a survival guide for college students entitled, Choosing the Right College (Eerdmans). Nafziger and his wife are the proud parents of two children.

1994-1995
A.G. Harmon (Catholic) put aside his law practice to come to the Milton Center where he worked on completing his first novel. After leaving TMC, Harmon earned a Ph.D. at Catholic University. He is working on his third novel and is represented by the William Morris agency. Harmon's regular contributions to Image have included an essay on the last ten years of fiction, as well as an interview with the Pulitzer prizewinning novelist Oscar Hijuelos. His essay on Edith Stein recently appeared in the collection Things in Heaven and Earth. Harmon won the Richard Weaver Fellowship at Catholic University, which is awarded to a graduate student in the Humanities. He won the Peter Taylor Prize for his novel, A House All Stilled, which was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2002. He currently teaches in the law school at Catholic University.

1994-1995
Christine Tachick (Episcopalian) has completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Several of the stories Chris wrote during her Milton Center fellowship have appeared in print, including "Learning to Polka" in The Wisconsin Academy Review, "Some of the Things That Didn't Burn" in Passages North, and "Veterans of Foreign Wars" in Porcupine. Tachick has also completed a novel and a collection of stories. Her story "The Next Greatest Thing" appeared in the April 1999 edition of Seventeen Magazine and was nominated for Best American Short Stories.

Click here for a fellowship application.