2024 Summer Residents
The competitive summer residency program is fully subsidized.
Jung Hae Chae
Jung Hae Chae is a Korean American writer and author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays, POJANGMACHA PEOPLE (Graywolf Press, 2025), winner of the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The book deeply explores the matrilineal inheritance of han in the Korean diaspora. Built from memory, imagination, and meditative inquiry, these essays center the lives of “ordinary” Korean women-mothers—of postwar, diasporic households—who take action as the makers of their own fortunes, even when thwarted by the oppressive forces that have affected them and generations before them. Chae's work has been distinguished with the 2021 Crazyhorse Prize in Nonfiction, the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest in Nonfiction from Ploughshares, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. Her writing can be found in AGNI, Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), and the Best American Essays 2022 among others. She has been supported by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, among others. Jung Hae holds an MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.
Nathan Fitch
Nathan Fitch is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor at The New School University. A member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Nathan’s award winning films have been published by The New York Times Op Docs,TIME, The New Yorker, PBS/America ReFramed, and NPR, to name a few. Nathan’s feature length directorial debut, Island Soldier, won a number of film festival awards, and was broadcast on PBS in 2018. Nathan holds an MFA from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter college, where he was the recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Picture of the Year International award. Nathan's most recently completed project, IN EXILE, has played extensively at film festivals both in the United States and abroad, winning the Reel South Award at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in 2023. IN EXILE was broadcast on PBS in April 2024. With funding from Pacific Islanders in Communications/PBS, The New York State Council for the Arts, and a Lang Faculty grant, Nathan is currently in production on a new film called Essential Islanders, which he will be working on while in residence this summer.
Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024) and the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon (Wesleyan University Press, 2026). A former MacDowell Fellow, Kenyon Review Fellow, and Lucille Medwick Memorial Awardee, Ok has taught creative writing at Wellesley College, University of California San Diego, and Wichita State University. While in residence, Ok will work on finalizing essay and poem translations of Kim Hyesoon for book publication, as well as writing on teaching translation in the creative writing classroom.
Liz Margolies
Liz Margolies, LCSW, has been a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City for the last 45 years. As a lifelong queer health activist, Liz founded the National LGBT Cancer Network in 2005 and served as its Executive Director until 2020. Since her son’s arrest in 2019, Liz has been researching the experiences of mothers of incarcerated sons. Discovering a dearth of writing in the professional literature, she began her own deep dive into the lived experience of diverse mothers across the country. Liz’s residency project is to write a creative nonfiction piece on mothers of incarcerated sons who, carrying the lion’s share of responsibilities for their sons’ financial, emotional, and legal needs, are at increased risk for health disparities of their own. Liz’s goal is to publish her piece(s) in mainstream publications, reaching a broad swath of impacted individuals, many of whom are severely isolated due to stigma and shame.
Alexis Salas
Dr. Alexis Salas specializes in Latin American and Latino/a/e/x art and visual culture. Dr. Salas holds the position of Endowed Assistant Professor of arts in the Americas in art history at the University of Arkansas. In the 2024-25 academic year Salas will be the Terra Visiting Professor at Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Salas will be devoting her residency to working on Jotx: Queer Latinx Art and Activism, a project that historically grounds art and activism’s relationships to political movements such as the US Civil Rights movement, the international AIDS crisis, and marriage equality. The project situates Latinx contributions to art and activism within the larger queer POC struggle. Among the artforms used, reinvented, and transformed by POC activists, Dr. Salas looks at dance turned to vogue, how ‘zines (little magazines) seized the small press literary publication, ball culture's interventions in performance, and craft unfolded into the AIDS quilt.