Scholarship Recipients
Elisabeth vasquez hein
Elisabeth Vasquez Hein is a Filipina American writer and photographic artist based in Seattle. Daughter of an immigrant, mother of a mixed-race child, and influenced by her upbringing in disparate geographies, Elisabeth’s work explores migration, in-betweenness, and belonging. Elisabeth is a 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow in creative nonfiction. Her writing is featured or forthcoming in CRAFT, the Pinch, Bellingham Review, Silk Road Review, Salt Hill, and Mixed Roots: Writers on Multiracial Identity & Both/And Belonging (Beacon Press).
Araminta Award Recipient
Julie Early Sifuentes
Julie Early Sifuentes is a daughter, mother and a person with mixed cultural roots. Born near the Umpqua River in Oregon with deep roots in the Andes mountains, she has lived most of her life in the Pacific Northwest. Drawn to cultural anthropology to better understand herself, she now is an applied anthropologist who loves working with story to facilitate organizational change.
Phoebe Award Recipient
Michele Godrie
Michele is an Ancestral Lineage Healing practitioner, and chronic illness and end of life doula, born and raised in NYC, and now living in New Jersey. She is descended from French, Celtic and Germanic people on her father’s side, and Jewish North African, Levantine and Southern European people on her mother’s. Over the last 25 years, she’s studied and practiced various spiritual traditions, eventually finding her home in earth-honoring, animist lineages, and becoming a practitioner of spirit-mediated practices. Her journey down this path started when childhood trauma turned into acute chronic illness and completely altered her life. Heartbreakingly, 10 years later, her daughter developed the same patterns of illness and disruption of her own life’s path and ambitions, and up until recently, Michele has been her primary caretaker. What these experiences have come to teach her is that healing and grace are always available, if not always in the forms we want and expect.
Phoebe Award Recipient
Course Fellows
Fatima B. Jalloh
Fatima B. Jalloh (they/them) is a poet and journalist from Jacksonville, FL, now based in Brooklyn, NYC. A recent graduate of Northwestern University, their writing combines a love for journalism, academia and literature with lived experience as a queer Black artist. Born to Sierra Leonean refugees and raised under the Islamic faith, their writing reckons with themes of origin, identity and theology through Afropessimism, nihilism and hints of absurdism. They currently work as an Editorial Intern for The Nation, and pursue creative and journalistic projects as a freelancer.
Course Fellow and Coordinator
Lauren Levato Coyne
Lauren Levato Coyne is a queer artist, writer, and STEAM educator. Her ancestors moved from the UK, Ireland, and the Northwest Highlands to Southern Appalachia and the Great Smoky Mountains. These divided ranges were once a single body called the Central Pangean mountain range. So it is fitting Levato Coyne left the Midwest for the Berkshire Highlands, the Appalachian subrange that was once the ancestral home of Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican people. There, she teaches both writing and drawing at Williams College. She is also the 2025-26 artist and writer in residence at UMass Amherst's Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.
Course Fellow
Kaleiheana Stormcrow
Kaleiheana Stormcrow is a queer Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet, writer, ritualist, artist, hair wizard, and dreamer. They live off-grid with their partner, three dogs, chickens and a collection of endangered native plants on the slopes of Kīlauea in the illegally occupied sovereign Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. They have a B.S. in Wildlife Sciences from Oregon State University and an M.S. from UH Mānoa in Natural Resources and Environmental Management—and they think calling more-than-human ancestors "resources" is gross. Currently Kaleiheana is writing a biocultural memoir, making feather lei, and searching for portals.
Course Fellow
Andrea goodman
Andrea Goodman is a priestess, vocalist/composer, sound-healer, mythic astrologer, poet, spiritual teacher and counselor, has been part of a groundswell of innovative women’s creative and spiritual emergence. She was an original member of the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble, performing, recording and touring worldwide, 1974-1991, singing without words in the universal, timeless language of sound. Andrea is a co-founder, with Rev. Mother Ione and Pauline Oliveros, of the Ministry of Maåt in 1997, and holds the title of High Priestess of the Double Maåti. She lives on an island on the Maine coast, where she offers teaching and counseling in person or remotely, and hosts circles, retreats, blessings and ceremonies. Andrea’s recordings include Divine Doorways, The Moon’s Daughter & Other Song-Stories, and Songs of Sappho. Her book is called Lightning Holds My Hand, A Woman’s Journal of Guidance.
Course Fellow