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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. 

Portrait of a person with short hair and a piercing, wearing an orange shirt, resting their chin on their hand against a white background.

The 2025-26 Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence is Danez Smith.

Danez Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a poet, performer, and cultural critic, their work surpasses arbitrary boundaries to deliver art that is compelling, dismantles oppressive structures, and resonates with the human heart. Smith has authored four poetry collections, including Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024), which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The collection is described as a compilation of “searching, stunning poems,” where “Smith metaphorizes city into body politic, showing us the interstate running through all our hearts; demonstrating that we all contain protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives,” according to Nam Le at The New York Times Book Review. Other works include Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which won the Minnesota Book Award and the Heartland Bookseller Award, and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award; Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Forward Prize; and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They have also published two chapbooks, Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2014), which won the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Most recently, Smith edited Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes (Hachette, 2024).

Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. From 2017 to 2021, they co-hosted the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS, and are a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective, a group that aims to help poets find common ground in their commitment to using art as a site for radical truth-telling. Smith teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, and lives in Minneapolis with their people.

A woman with glasses and braids stretches her hair out, wearing a red bandana and scarf, against a blue background.

The 2024-25 Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence was 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 2023-24 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.