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, Better, MiPoesias, 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/him and they/them)

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.

Vika Mujumdar, Assistant Director (she/her)

Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Western Massachusetts. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. She teaches writing and works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.

Montanna Harling, Assistant Director (she/her)

Montanna Harling is an MFA in Prose candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she specializes in speculative eco-fiction. She attended the 2024 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and has a BA with Honors in Literature and Writing from UC San Diego. Montanna’s writing has been published in Small Wonders Magazine, F(r)iction Magazine, and O(the)r People Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2022 Saier Memorial Award in Fiction, and both the 2023 and 2024 Art and Sustainability Fellowships at UMass Amherst.