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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. 

The 2024 Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence is 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.