Fellowship Recipients
In recent years, Shannaghe has asked writers to explore the experience and impact of care in all its venues: in family and friendship, in the classroom, the clinic, the courtroom, the environment. A panel carefully reads the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and a final judge chooses the Fellow. Here are the results:
Jill Zimon
Jill Zimon has won the 2026 Shannaghe Fellowship in Care for her excerpt, “Three Months In Woodbridge,” part of a memoir focusing on the intersection of eldercare and addiction.
The Shannaghe Fellowship supports and celebrates writing that explores care in any of its many venues, including family, friendship, the classroom, the courtroom, and the environment, as well as healthcare. The award includes a two-week residency at Shannaghe, located in Belfast, Maine, plus stipend.
Zimon’s work has been published in The New York Times, Politico, Newsweek, BUST, Writer’s Digest, Quill, and CNN, among others. She co-founded and led the nonpartisan Ohio Debate Commission and literally wrote the playbook—downloaded thousands of times—on how to conduct civil, meaningful candidate and issue debates.
Her current piece begins when police find her 83-year-old mother unconscious due to alcohol abuse. To help her mother, Zimon left her husband to move back into her childhood home. The nine weeks that followed shape her work-in-progress on the too-often fatal effects of ageism, alcoholism, and stigma. In describing the sweep of the work, Zimon wrote: “Helping them doesn’t help them. A hard lesson to apply when you’re a caregiver.” And yet—mother and daughter struggle together. “Together, and on our own, we combat ageism and alcohol addiction—a fatal problem for tens of thousands of Americans over 65, and one that is poised to get worse.”
In awarding the fellowship, the author and essayist Michele Morano called it “ a compelling story at the intersection of aging and addiction that points to the complexity of caregiving, which so often happens from afar.” The scenes are terrific, Morano wrote, and this “looks like a great book project.” Morano is the author of two books, and numerous essays; she serves at chair of DePaul University’s English Department.
Amy Berkowitz
Amy Berkowitz won the 2025 Shannaghe Fellowship in Care with their lyric essay exploring birth trauma and postpartum depression. The award includes a two-week residency at Shannaghe, plus stipend.
In awarding the fellowship, the poet Steve Langan wrote this about Berkowitz’s work:
“In these vivid and sometimes ironic and darkly humorous segments, this author brings me back to the first sentence of the mission statement of Columbia University’s pioneering program in Narrative Medicine: 'The care of the sick unfolds in stories.' Layer upon layer, brilliantly paced to maximize reader interest and connection, the author provides uncensored access to mysterious and challenging healthcare situations, procedures, and diagnoses… A rare energy radiates in these pages. I’m left wanting more.”
Berkowitz is the author of Gravitas (Éditions du Noroît / Total Joy, 2023) and Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019).
Their writing and conversations have appeared in Bitch, The Believer, BOMB, and elsewhere and she has received support from the Anderson Center at Tower View, This Will Take Time, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, among other arts organizations. Berkowitz cohosts a popular outdoor reading series called Light Jacket, while working on a second novel and a nonfiction project. You can find more about Berkowitz work here: https://www.amyberko.com/
Emily Strasser’s work—excerpted from her memoir, Half-Life of a Secret—placed second for Shannaghe’s Fellowship in Care. The award includes a residency at Shannaghe.
In writing about her excerpt, entitled “Bombed without a Bang,” the poet Steve Langan wrote:
“[The author] takes on the environmental damage left behind from the Cold War arms race. From memories of vacations in “the main house” and the nearby beach to inclusion of records of the damage done to her special place and its people, the reader, in this kaleidoscopic narrative, is deftly moved in and out of time… It seems this author is fighting for everyone who ever inhabited Oak Ridge. Or has been affected by environmental negligence.”
Alongside Half-Life, which was awarded the 2024 Reed Environmental Writing Award and the 2024 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir and Creative
Nonfiction, Strasser’s writing has appeared Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. You can learn more here. https://emilystrasser.com
In 2026, Shannaghe hopes to see writers addressing similar issues. Applications for The Fellowship in Care open in November, and close January 15, 2027.