Staff

Betsy Wheeler, Director (she/her)

Betsy Wheeler is the author of the poetry collection Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room and the poetry chapbooks Start Here and Mental Detours. She earned her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University in 2005, and held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University from 2005-2007. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Windfall Room, The Journal, Bat City Review, Washington Square, Forklift Ohio and elsewhere. She lives with her wife and kiddo in Amherst, MA. 

Noy Holland, Creative Director and Co-founder (she/her)

Noy Holland received the Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books include I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories; the novel Bird; and three collections of short fiction—Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published fiction and essays in Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Antioch, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Believer, and NOON, among others. She is a co-founder and Creative Director of the Juniper Institute, and a partner in the collaborative interdisciplinary series Art Sustainability Activism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Jeff Parker, Creative Director (he/him)

Jeff Parker is the author of the nonfiction book Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). With Pasha Malla, he co-assembled the book of found sports poetry Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion (Featherproof), and with Annie Liontas he edited A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors (UMass Press). His short fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and many others. He currently teaches in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the cofounder and Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, as well as a Creative Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

Porter Lunceford, Managing Director (he/they)

Porter Lunceford is a queer writer from northern Utah. Porter holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and teaches college writing and creative writing.

Margo Kinney-Petrucha, Assistant Director (she/her)

Margo Kinney-Petrucha is a playwright, comedian, animator, and fiction writer studying prose at the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her work has been showcased at Obvious Child Productions’ Almost Theatre Festival, the Wheelhouse Comedy Club, the Five College Film Festival, and The Secret Theatre, where her play The Pact was a finalist in the Act One, One-Act Festival. Her literary work has been published in Fleas on the Dog Magazine. She has a degree in Mixed Media Writing from Hampshire College.

Jess Liu, Assistant Director

Jess Liu is studying poetry at UMass Amherst, where they are an MFA Fellow and work at the intersection of poetics, politics, queer theory, and sound studies. They were born in Madison, WI and hold a BA from Yale University, where they won the John Hubbard Curtis prize for their poetry scholarship and were a Woodbridge Fellow and Questbridge Scholar. Find their writing in Antiphony, Tagvverk, Protean Magazine, Seam Allowance, and The Amenia Free Review.

Subrina Moorley, Assistant Director (she/her)

Subrina Moorley is an Indo-Caribbean fiction writer hailing from New York and currently studying at UMass Amherst’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers, where she is a Delaney Fellow. She spent over a decade supporting students in higher education before embarking on her second graduate program. Her work explores first-generation experiences and themes like capitalism, colonialism, and displacement/arrival. Most recently her stories have been featured in Rathalla Review and Heavy Feather Review.