Join us on Tuesday, January 3, 7-9pm at Big Bear Used Books & Café for Writers Night Out with featured writer Rick Paar.

Big Bear Used Books & Café is located in the Keystone Building, 122 Pleasant Street, Easthampton, MA. There is ample parking right across the street. Food & beverage available for sale. No registration required. Suggested donation $5 to help cover space use fee.

Masks are not currently required for indoor events. Please wear a mask if you would like to exercise caution.

Bio: Rick Paar is the author of God Bless America and Breakfast Burritos to Go. He is also a psychologist who chaired the Department of Psychology at Springfield College where he taught courses in counseling and psychotherapy. He served on the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Psychological Association. His stories have been published in Meat for Tea, Blue Nib, Aethelon, Voices, Psychotherapy Patient, and The International Journal of Play among others. He has been a columnist for three newspapers/journals and is on the board of Straw Dogs Writers Guild. His academic writing has appeared in a variety of journals with topics ranging from the metaphysical, to play and creativity. He is currently working on his next book.

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They are Vida James, Regine Jackson, and Syki Barbee (L to R in the photo above).  One writer will be named the 2022-23 Fellow in March. 

The Fellow will receive a $3000 grant from Straw Dog Writers Guild to be used for writing-related expenses, access to mentors who can offer assistance with writing needs identified by the Fellow, a professional author website, valued at $1,500, sponsored by Valley of Writers, membership to Straw Dog Writers Guild for two years, and other benefits.

Syki Barbee of Springfield MA is a first-generation college graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and specializations in Professional Writing and Technical Communication & Creative Writing from UMass, Amherst. She is passionate about the centralization of BIPOC characters and characters from other underrepresented communities in literature. 

Born and raised in Springfield, MA, Regine Jackson loved reading as a child. Her mother worked as a clerk and page at different libraries in the city and would always bring books home – from manga to Diana Wynne Jones. Regine grew up wanting to write characters in those worlds; characters who looked like her and who she could relate to. 

Vida James is a Nuyorican social worker from Brooklyn, NY. She is a Delaney Fellow in the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets & Writers. She is the winner of the 2021 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Award and a 2021 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, Bread Loaf, and VONA/Voices. She has work appearing in Story, New England Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere.

The Emerging Writer Fellowship was designed to support women of color and gender-expansive writers of color based in Western Massachusetts at the early stages of their careers. The Fellowship was created to help emerging writers negotiate barriers that may prevent them from accessing mentorship and pursuing publication of their work. In 2022-23, the second cycle of the Emerging Writer Fellowship Program, the genre is fiction.

This year, the selection panel was made up of writers Kaija Langley, Aqueela Culbreath-Britt, and Fungai Tichawangana. Speaking on behalf of the panel, Tichawangana said that a number of the writing samples submitted by the applicants made intriguing reading. “We received some great writing samples and it made the selection process enjoyable. There was quite a leaning towards speculative fiction, which resonates with trends we are seeing in publishing.” 

The finalist will be named at the beginning of March.

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Registration is required. Register HERE.

Bio: Nancy McCabe is the author of six books, most recently Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir, which explores the story of her ill-advised, ill-fated youthful marriage through hermit crab essays and extended metaphors. Her books also include From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood and the novel Following Disasters. Her short pieces have appeared in numerous publications, most recently Salon, ACM, Entropy, and Essay Daily, in addition to such places as Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work has received a Pushcart and made notable listings eight times in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. She also teaches in the Spalding low-residency MFA program and online for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.

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Registration is required. Register in advance by clicking HERE.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email (within 24 – 48 hours) containing information about joining the meeting. For security purposes, all attendees must register via this link. Names not on the registration list will not be admitted at the time of the event. Contact strawdogevents@gmail.com for questions.

Bio: Adin Thayer grew up in Virginia. During the past 19 years, she has spent time working in Rwanda and neighboring countries in Africa. The experiences and people she has encountered through that work, as well as the impact of her childhood during Jim Crow, inform and inhabit her poetry. Her work also attempts to express and explore the ways the natural world’s power, beauty and lawfulness do and could affect how we behave as people.

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Applications are open to women and gender-expansive writers of color based in the Western MA counties of Frankin, Hampshire, and Hampden. Applicants must be in the early stages of their career and, in this cycle, must be writers of fiction.

The fellow will receive a $3000 stipend (up from $2,500) which can be used in any way the fellow chooses as long as it helps with their writing; e.g. to subsidize workshop attendance, writing residency fees, writing-related travel, competition fees, time off work to write, child-care.

The fellow will also receive complimentary Straw Dog Writers Guild membership during the year and access to mentors who can offer insight on craft, revision, promotion, publishing, or other writing needs identified by the fellow.

Other benefits include a professionally designed author website courtesy of Valley of Writers and an opportunity to promote their work through the Straw Dog Writers Guild mailing list and social media platforms.

The inaugural cycle of the Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Fellowship was for poetry and the selected fellow was Amina Jordan-Mendez (Pictured above).

Applications must be completed between November 1 and December 30, 2021. Finalists will be asked to participate in an interview and the selection committee decision will be announced by March 1, 2022. The fellowship term will run from May 2022 to May 2023.

The application form and more details are available online here.

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