Ekhlas Ahmed is a refugee and activist from Darfur, Sudan. She fled with her family to Egypt and lived there for two years before being resettled in Portland, Maine in 2005. She is the founder of Chance To Advance an organization raising awareness in her community of the violence and needs in Darfur. She is currently working on an autobiography in poetry form.

Linda Aldrich is currently Portland, Maine’s poet laureate and has published two collections of poetry, March and Mad Women and Foothold, with a new book, Ballast, coming this winter. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and her poem “Woman-without-Arms” won the Emily Dickinson Award from Universities West Press.

Kerri Arsenault is a book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, and a contributing editor at The Literary Hub. She is also a mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program. Her work has appeared in Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, Down East, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review of Books, and Air Mail. Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, is her first book.

John Cariani is an award-winning stage, film and television actor who grew up in Presque Isle, Cariani is the author of four popular plays. His debut play, “Almost Maine,” is one of the most frequently produced plays in the country.

Colin Cheney is a writer, poet and the author of Here Be Monsters, a National Poetry Series selection. His poems have appeared in publications such as AGNI, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Cheney has received a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is creator and co-host of the podcast Poet in Bangkok.

Gretchen Eberhart Cherington is the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart. Her memoir, Poetic License, focuses on life among her parents’ social circle of literary giants, exposing the difficult realities behind the myths. Her family spent summers on Cape Rosier.

Kate Christensen is the author of seven novels, including The Great Man, winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award, and two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir.

Deborah Cummins is author of the essay collection, Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine, and of three poetry collections: Until They Catch Fire, Counting the Waves, and Beyond the Reach. Her poems and essays have appeared in nine anthologies, in over sixty journals and magazines

Jonathan Lethem, novelist, essayist and short story writer, is a summer resident of Blue Hill and is best known for his 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. His most recent novel, The Arrest, is the story of what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. Sandy Duplessis, a one-time successful screenwriter, is holed up in rural Maine delivering food from his sister’s organic farm, when an old friend and nemesis, once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, shows up in an extraordinary vehicle.

Anica Mrose Rissi, who grew up in Deer Isle and spends part of the year there now, is the author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens, including the Anna, Banana chapter books, Love, Sophia on the Moon and Nobody Knows But You.

Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Her most recent novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy , has been published in 22 languages in 30 countries and won the 2017 Nautilus Award (Gold) and the New England Society Book Award. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys , an Oprah magazine summer-reading pick and winner of both the May Sarton Memoir Award and the 2016 Maine Literary Award. Ernie’s Ark was excerpted on NPR’s Selected Shorts and selected by several towns and cities as their One Book, One Community read.