ROCKLAND — The first Writer-in-Residence at Millay House Rockland will be Melissa McKinstry, a poet from San Diego, California.

The inaugural Millay House Rockland Residency will be for the month of October 2024 and includes a generous stipend from the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation.

“The Millay House is honored to offer its Writer-in-Residence the opportunity to create in the house where Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, a city that combines a historically significant working waterfront with a flourishing art scene,” said Millay House Rockland, in a news release.

The juried residency competition was launched through local media and literary sources on Millay’s birthday in February 2024, and the winner, selected by National Book Award winning poet and memoirist Mark Doty, was notified on June 2. Applicants from across the country submitted works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, or journalism.

In explaining his choice of McKinstry, Doty writes, “In considering each writer’s engagement with language, and the vitality of the project, my selection process led me to Melissa McKinstry’s application. There are many different strengths displayed here, which is wonderful to see. I found myself valuing most an imaginative engagement with difficulty that pushes a writer to create work energized by what Wallace Stevens called ‘the pressure of reality.’ Her poems find lyrical precision and terrible beauty in the long work of caring for a profoundly disabled child – an almost unknowable boy held in an unblinking gaze and an unfailing heart.”

Melissa McKinstry holds an MFA from Pacific University, and her poetry appears in such journals as The Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, december, Tahoma Literary Review, and Best New Poets 2023. For more information on the poet, please visit https://www.melissamckinstry.com. To celebrate the Millay House Rockland’s first Writer-in-Residency, Melissa McKinstry will offer a public poetry reading during her stay in October.

“Millay House Rockland would like to thank the Writer-in-Residence partner, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and the five preliminary judges: Carl Little, poet and author of books about Maine Art; Ellen Taylor, Professor of English at University of Maine-Augusta; Jeffrey Thomson, Chair of the Division of Humanities and the Arts at University of Maine-Farmington; Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Executive Director of Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance; and Dean Lunt, Editor in Chief of Island Port Press,” said Millay House Rockland.

Millay House Rockland, located at 198 Broadway in Rockland, Maine, is a nonprofit organization that champions poets, as well as creators and practitioners of all the arts. It celebrates the legacy of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the rich heritage of Midcoast Maine. Central to the mission is rejuvenating the literary landmark that is the birthplace of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. For more information on Millay House Rockland, please visit https://millayhouserockland.org/about.