Late Spring Writers Residency 2026

Jessica Westhead (she/her) is an author, editor, and creative writing teacher who has been working with fellow writers since 2005. She has taught creative writing at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University, and facilitated at Sage Hill Writing. Jessica’s fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, selected for the Journey Prize anthology, and nominated for a National Magazine Award, and has been published in major literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. She is the author of the novels Pulpy & Midge (Coach House Books) and Worry (HarperCollins) and the critically acclaimed short-story collections And Also Sharks and Things Not to Do (Cormorant Books) and Avalanche (Invisible Publishing). And Also Sharks was a Globe & Mail Top 100 Book, one of Kobo’s Best Ebooks of 2011, and a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Worry was included on CBC Books’ Best Canadian Fiction of 2019 and the CBC Canada Reads Longlist. Jessica lives in Toronto with her family.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Dante’s Inferno, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish, which refracts his experience of working with migrants in Sicily with Stories in Transit. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret’s The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022. His version of Dante’s Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published in October 2024 – “A Dante like no other” (London Review Bookshop). He is currently translating The Essential Baudleaire for Pushkin Press.

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and combined. Recent books include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020) and the pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Translations include The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects. She teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art in the Literary Arts department at Brown University.

Anna Moschovakis works with poetry and prose as a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher, and designer. Her most recent book is An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel (Soft Skull, 2024). Other books include Participation (2022), Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (2018), They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (2016), and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is the translator of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (Frère d’âme), for which she and Diop received the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book award; other translations include Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Harley) Marcelle Sauvageot’s Commentary. She is a longtime member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY. Recently, she launched Dirt Editions, an informally distributed pamphlet press. Her collaborative translation of Mihret Kebede’s #evolutionarypoems will be published in November by Circumference Books.