Residency Plan: During this residency, I’ll be working on a manuscript that examines the consequences of climate collapse on our planet, our own human embodiment, and how we resolve our roles as individuals in a species that reshapes its world in drastic ways. I’m looking forward to revising poems in early days draft form and organizing the whole many-tentacled assemblage. To securing myself in a room no one else will enter for a few days, tacking the poems to the walls, whispering them aloud to myself–which is not at all weird when one is not surrounded by pets, children, housemates, etc–until each word is tweaked. I’ll pace around the property–a former monastery! atmospheric, verdant–fold no one else’s laundry, think my poem thoughts without pausing to resolve a dispute over homework, and enjoy other such small miracles. I’ll also rely on the infinitely rejuvenating effects of being in the company of other working artists at work–there is nothing quite so bolstering as knowing the hive is abuzz with making.

Bio: Danielle Pafunda is the author nine books of prose and poetry including: Spite (The Operating System), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions, winner of Troubling the I), Beshrew (Dusie Press), The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books), Manhater (Dusie Press), and Iatrogenic (Noemi Press). She’s published two chapbooks: Cram (Essay Press) and When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land (Birds of Lace). Her work has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, and a number of anthologies and journals. She teaches poetry, fiction, and worldbuilding at Rochester Institute of Technology.

daniellepafunda.com

Residency Plan: During the BAC Poetry Residency, I’ll be working on the finishing touches to two manuscripts: Naming the Ghost, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press November 2022, and In a Body, a current work in progress. Naming the Ghost is a collection of poems that follow a new mother as she contends with a ghost that has taken up residence in her life. The speaker is also facing her father’s death, her new motherhood, and the search for a diagnosis. In a Body is a collection of poems exploring chronic illness and its effect on the body and spirit. How do chronic fatigue and pain isolate a person? In a Body looks to the natural world for answers while questioning what it is like to be any body on Earth. These poems ruminate on where bodies—human, plant, and animal—fit into their ecosystems, and what that means for a temporary human body struggling to thrive.

Bio: Emily Hockaday is a poet and editor living in Queens. Her first full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, will be out with Cornerstone Press in November 2022. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Starting a Life, What We Love & Will Not Give Up, Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide, and Space on Earth. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals, as well as with the Poets of Queens and Parks & Points’ Wayfinding anthologies. Emily is the recipient of a New York City Artists Corps grant, a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant, and the winner of the Middle House Review Editors’ Prize. Her poems have been featured on RadioLab, with the performance series Emotive Fruition, and in the Office Hours Fellows showcase events.

You can find Emily on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com or @E_Hockaday.

Residency Plan: I plan to write new poems that weave a response to climate crisis and other current events with experiences of parenting and exploring my identity as a mother. My first full-length book of poetry, SOLASTALGIA (forthcoming in Fall 2022 from June Road Press), deals directly with the climate crisis. Those poems were deeply informed by the particular environments I was writing in, at artist residencies in Washington state and Vermont, and in Philadelphia, where I used to live. I look forward to being inspired by the landscape at Bethany Arts and seeing how the natural environment gets woven into my new poems.

Bio: Hila Ratzabi’s first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from June Road Press. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Linebreak, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, The Normal School, and other journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She is the former editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Storyscape and holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the Director of Virtual Content & Programs at Ritualwell.org, and lives in Oak Park, Illinois, with her husband and two children.

Twitter: @HilaRatzabi

Residency Plan: I am nearing the completion of a second book of poems, and I would use my time at BAC to finalize the manuscript of 50-60 poems. The manuscript is currently called *At New Vrindaban*. The poems are dedicated to my former punk rock college bandmates and explore the loss of their lives in middle life to suicide, overdose and cancer. In addition, the book includes a number of poems exploring family, fatherhood, and marriage. A potential recent addition to the manuscript — and something I would like to focus on the most at BAC — is a section that will be a response to a contemporary German painter’s works (Eva Strautmann), paintings driven by the horse-imagery running through my manuscript. She and I are collaborating separately on a planned online exhibition in May of 2022, and that work would be my secondary purpose at BAC.

Bio: Jacob Strautmann’s debut book of poems The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business is available from Four Way Books. Awarded a 2018 Massachusetts Poetry Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Jacob Strautmann’s poems have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Appalachian Journal, Southern Humanities Review, and Blackbird.
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www.jacobstrautmann.com

Residency Plan: I plan to spend my time at Bethany Arts Community generating new poems and revising. Being in a new environment sparks creativity for me, as does talking with other artists. Once I get into this creative space, the concentration required for revision is easier. Together, the poems I have been writing tell a life story, but on their own they are odes to specific aspects of place–– incantations for spaces where I feel connected or rejected, and identities I have had to go back and salvage. Much of my poetry requires a bit of research, sometimes into my past and other times into a political or ecological issue. I research and photograph the details of places I visit and plan to do this at BAC too.

Bio: Meredith Arena (she/they) is a queer writer originally from New York City, now living on the land of the Duwamish people, AKA, Seattle. She is a teaching artist, organizer, gardener, and ambivert. Her work can be found in various journals including Longleaf Review, Peatsmoke, Blood Orange Review, and forthcoming in Poetry NW. She was the 2021 Erin Donovan fellow in poetry at Mineral School in Washington. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.

Twitter: @mereditharena

Residency Plan: I am currently working on two projects which I plan to concentrate on during my time at Bethany: 1. a chapbook of 28 books unified by the moon appearing in some form or phase in each of the poems. 2. my second full-length collection of poetry titled: Return: Against the Flow which will be a sequel of sorts to my previous full-length: Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters. Through poetry, this new volume will explore the “re-matriation” movement in Puerto Rico which has seen many Puerto Ricans return to the island to help rebuild after hurricane Maria so brutally destroyed much of the infrastructure contrasted with a larger exodus of people that accelerated after the hurricane. Most of the book will be in the first person including my own personal experiences in relation to the island. I look forward to writing in the context of a community of writers.

Bio: Susana Praver-Pérez is a Pushcart-nominated poet and a winner of the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Prize for Poetry (2021) who divides her time between Oakland, California and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Susana is an alum of Las Dos Brujas Writers’ Workshop and has studied creative writing at Naropa Institute, UC Berkley’s “Poetry for the People,” and Berkley City College from which she received a Certificate in Creative Writing with a focus on Poetry. Susana’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including: The Acentos Review, Dovetales: Writing for Peace, About Place Journal, Poets Reading the News and many others. Her first full-length book of poetry titled: Hurricanes, Love Affairs and Other Disasters, was released by Nomadic Press (June 2021). Link to order: https://bit.ly/SPPHurricanes

susanapraverperez.com

Facebook: Susana Praver-Perez