Millay House Rockland Writers-in-Residence 2025-2026

Millay House Rockland, in partnership with the Ellis Beauregard Foundation, is pleased to announce the two winners for the 2025-2026 Residencies are: October 2025, Joanna Young, a poet from Searsport, Maine and in July 2026, William Torrey, a fiction writer and essayist from Richmond, Virginia.  

Launched on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birthday in February 2025, the juried residency competition received submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and journalism from across the country. 12 finalists were chosen by a preliminary jury (see details below), and two Writers-in-Residence were selected by our final judge, renowned essayist Gretel Ehrlich. 

With generational roots in Vinalhaven, Maine, poet Joanna Young’s work explores the “infinity" she writes from, the midcoast landscapes that initiate her into a world of beauty, mystery, and healing. Ehrlich said of her work:

These poems are sharp-shinned, instinctive, deep, and diverse. . . yet spiced with immediate and local detail. The lines are mesmerizing yet piercing and concise. . . There’s a questing mind in these poems, reaching and touching and floundering again within what she calls, “her double helix of loss.”

William Torrey is the author of the forthcoming novella Freedom of Movement (Regal House, 2027). His short stories and essays have appeared widely in magazines such as The Missouri Review and The North American Review. A recipient of fellowships and grants from The Delaware Division of the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, he teaches writing at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Of his work, Ehrlich said:

This talented writer gives us swift, light-footed prose that sweeps us into the collapse and resurgence of four men, ill-equipped to face themselves and their questions of shame and redemption, as well as the necessary ingredients and value of true friendship.

Millay House Rockland would like to thank our Writer-in-Residence partner, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and our five preliminary judges: Chelsea Jackson, poet and co-editor of The Maine Review; Debra Spark, Professor of English at Colby College; Ellen Taylor, Professor of English at University of Maine-Augusta; Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Executive Director of Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance; and Jeffrey Thomson, Chair of the Division of Humanities and the Arts at University of Maine-Farmington. And our heartfelt thanks to Gretel Ehrlich, our final judge this year for her close reading and thoughtful choices.

We’d like to leave you all with these thoughts from Ehrlich after reading the work of the 12 finalists:

I encourage everyone to read voraciously with the highest standards. Fiction, poetry, and nonfiction: Kawabata, Camus, Faulkner, Lawrence, Proust, Marquez, Hemingway, Dillard, Mathiessen, Hoagland, Lopez, MacFarlane, Powers, Winton, Flannigan, Graham, Stevens, Heaney, Wolcott, and on and on.

These are your teachers. Go to them often. Read science, history, Greek plays, Shakespeare, Noh Plays, anthropology, geology. 

A deep dive into the inner sanctuary of consciousness—you have to go there, beyond discursive thought. 

2025-2026 Millay House Rockland Writer-in-Residence Jurors

  • Gretel Ehrlich

    This year’s final juror was Gretel Ehrlich, essayist, poet and author of The Solace of Open Spaces, as well as several books of narrative essays, a novel, two memoirs, three books of poetry, a biography, a book of ethnology, and a children’s book, among others. Ehrlich’s books have received the PEN West Award for Nonfiction, the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Prose, and a Whiting Award. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  • Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

    Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including the New Republic, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Orion. He has helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks and currently serves as Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. 

  • Chelsea Jackson

    Chelsea C. Jackson is a cross-genre writer, editor, and writing coach, and the author of the poetry collection All Things Holy and Heathen (April Gloaming). Chelsea believes in creativity as a catalyst for change and enjoys work that asks hard questions and makes readers think. Their work has been featured in Fatal Flaw, Coffin Bell Journal, and Beyond Queer Words, among other publications. Chelsea has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and is the Co-Editor of The Maine Review. They live in Richmond, Virginia, with their partner and cuddly pitbull.

  • Debra Spark

    Debra Spark is the award-winning author of five novels, including the recent Discipline; two collections of short stories; and two books of essays on fiction writing, as well as editor/co-editor of two anthologies. She has been the recipient of several awards/grants including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College and taught for 25 years with the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

  • Ellen Taylor

    Professor of English, Dr. Ellen M. Taylor received her doctorate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at Harvard University, focusing on narrative development. She completed her BA in English at Tulane University, and her MA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Ellen has three poetry collections from Moon Pie Press, Homelands (2022), Compass Rose (2015), and Floating (2009). She chairs the annual Terry Plunkett Maine Poetry Festival, held each April at UMA. She has published in literary journals regionally, nationally, and internationally.

  • Jeffrey Thomson

    Jeffrey Thomson is the Director of the BFA Program at UMaine Farmington and the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime, winner of both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and Renovation. Birdwatching in Wartime is currently being translated into Spanish and Russian. His translations of the Roman poet, Catullus, are forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  In 2012 he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast.