Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence Program
The Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Fund was established by Bill and Karin Stahl in memory of their daughter, Kristina Stahl ’99, who died tragically in 2002. More information about Kristina.
The Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Fund supports the Creative Writing Program at Colby through three initiatives, the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence, the Kristina Stahl Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and the Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Internships.
Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence
Each year the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence brings a nationally recognized poet or prose writer to Colby to visit classes, lecture on craft, give a reading, and meet with creative writing students. Past writers-in-residence include Tony Hoagland, Margot Livesey, Maurice Manning, Steve Orlen, Bill Roorbach, Dani Shapiro, Jo Ann Beard, Edward Hirsch, Diane Suess, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Joan Wickersham, Marilyn Chin, and Mary Ruefle.
The 2025 Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence is Lynda Barry.
Barry is an award winning author and artist. She has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as “among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated.” She earned a degree from Evergreen State College during its early experimental period (1974-78), studying with painter and writing teacher Marilyn Frasca. Frasca’s questions about the nature of images and the role they play in day-to-day living have guided Barry’s work ever since.
Barry has authored 21 books, worked as a commentator for NPR, and had a regular monthly feature in Esquire, Mother Jones Magazine, Mademoiselle, and Salon. She created an album-length spoken word collection of stories called The Lynda Barry Experience, and was a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. Barry has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Philadelphia University of Art in 2015. Barry was also inducted into the Cartoonist’s Hall of Fame in 2016 and honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant) in 2019.
The 2024 Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence was Colson Whitehead.
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (an Oprah’s Book Club selection and winner of the 2016 National Book Award and 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He was named New York’s 11th State Author in 2018. His New York Times bestseller The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pultizer Prize for Fiction (making him only the fourth writer to win two Pulitzers in the Fiction category), the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. His latest bestselling novel, Harlem Shuffle, was published in the fall of 2021.
Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as “The New York Times”, “The New Yorker”, “New York Magazine”, “Harper’s” and “Granta.”
He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the 2020 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.