Boise City Writer-in-Residence
SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED
Next Opening: Summer 2027
Founded in 2023, the Boise City Writer-in-Residence (WiR) is a collaborative program between the Boise City Department of Arts & History, Boise Public Library, and The Cabin.
Funded by the City of Boise, the program offers six-month residencies that provide local writers with dedicated time and a stipend to support their creative practice, while connecting them with the community through free, monthly public programs and events.
At its core, the WiR program is a community-centered opportunity that builds meaningful connections between writers and Boise residents. Through workshops, readings, and collaborative projects, the Writers-in-Residence activates public spaces and invites people of all ages and backgrounds to engage with the literary arts.
Selected writers receive a one-time $5,000.00 stipend to support their creative work and their time to develop these programs.
Matthew Denton-Edmundson
Writer-in-Residence October 2026 – March 2027
Matthew Denton-Edmundson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Boise State University. He grew up in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where much of his writing takes place. He was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and got a degree from Florida State University, before he moved to Boise. His debut novel, Reclamation is forthcoming from Doubleday and will also be released in the United Kingdom and France. Denton-Edmundson’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, The American Scholar, The Hedgehog Review, Raritan, and Hobart. He was the winner of the 2024 Jeffery E. Smith Editors’ prize and his essay, How to Love Animals, was anthologized in the 2025 Best American Essays.
Fall Writing Workshop Event Series
Readers often decide in the first paragraph if they want to keep reading or not. There’s no one way to go about creating readerly interest quickly, but Boise City Writer-in-Residence Matthew Denton-Edmundson will discuss some of the many possibilities (language, pace, sensory details, withholding, stakes, etc.), share some strong examples, and guide participants through writing a good opening paragraph.
Stories (and novels) all too often sag in the middle. Even a very good opening can give way to a predictable story. This workshop will focus on the principles of complication (making the central conflict increasingly pressing) and oscillation (shuttling characters between emotional “poles” or “story values”) as ways of avoiding the mid-narrative slump. Matthew will then guide participants through writing a middle to a story that doesn’t even have a beginning yet.
Readers of different genres expect different things out of an ending, and we’ll try to cover a wide variety of possibilities, including reversals, epiphanies, symbolic and inconclusive endings. We’ll ask, what makes an ending satisfying? And: Should all endings be satisfying? Finally, we’ll write the ending to a story outline.
In this workshop, Boise City Writer-in-Residence Matthew Denton-Edmundson will discuss two methods of approaching a novel draft, the first leaning on Vladimir Propp’s "Morphology of a Folk Tale" and the second using a page taken from Joseph Campbell’s "The Hero’s Journey" (there’s more to it than you might think). We’ll share ideas for novels and talk about the habits of a successful writing life.
Drafting a novel can be approached with a structured plan, but that’s far from the only way to write a novel.
In this workshop, participants will explore the unconventional approaches of writers like Jesse Ball, Robert Olen Butler, and Jane Allison. We’ll look at Ball’s odd approach, Butler’s even odder notecard method, and Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.
Along the way, we’ll consider the balance between structure and freewheeling inspiration and the many ways a novel can take shape.
This workshop will cover practical revision techniques for both short stories and novels. How should you use feedback from beta readers? How do you plan and approach a revision? We’ll also explore reimagining characters, increasing narrative tension, and knowing what to cut.
Participants are encouraged to bring a piece of writing they’re working on. Boise City Writer-in-Residence Matthew Denton-Edmundson will facilitate discussion individual projects and help attendees find new possibilities and avenues forward.
Natanya Biskar
Writer-in-Residence April 2027 – September 2027
Natanya Biskar is a fiction writer based in Boise, Idaho. She earned her MFA in fiction from Boise State University, where she served as Associate Editor for The Idaho Review. Her work has appeared in Subtropics, The Indiana Review, and SELF. Born and raised in San Francisco, Natanya taught elementary school for more than ten years across the Pacific Northwest. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Past Writers-in-Residence
Now in its fourth season, the Boise City Writers-in-Residence Program has hosted a broad variety of events, led by a vastly talented array of writers. Learn more about the previous recipients and their work.
Spring 2025/2026 Writer-in-Residence Don Zancanella
Don Zancanella is the author of three novels: Concord, A Storm in the Stars, and Animals of the Alpine Front. He received the John S. Simmons/Iowa Short Fiction Award for his book Western Electric and has won an O.Henry Prize. Zancanella was born in Laramie, Wyoming, and has lived in Virginia, Colorado, Missouri, and New Mexico, where he taught at the University of New Mexico for nearly three decades. He lives in southeast Boise with his wife and their dogs.
Fall 2025/2026 Writer-in-Residence Kim Cross
Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author, journalist, and historian known for cinematic scenes, page-turning narratives, and character-driven stories that guide readers through some complex, nuanced issue. Her first book, What Stands in a Storm, was one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist in the GoodReads Choice Awards. Her most recent book, In Light of All Darkness, was an Edgar Award finalist and winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Distinguished Work of Non-Fiction. Cross teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s graduate program in journalism, the Larry McMurtry Literary Center in Archer City, Texas, and the Sawtooth Writing Retreat in Idaho. Find her at kimhcross.com, @kimhcross, or writing at Oldspeak in Garden City.
Though attendees are encouraged to attend the entire series, there’s value to attending any of the workshops as single events. No registration is required, but space is limited. The workshops are geared toward writers of all levels and genres. As mature content may be discussed, parental discretion is advised for participants under 18. Please bring writing materials, such as a notebook and pen.
Alan Heathcock, award-winning author of VOLT and 40, shared "The Five Tenets of Literary Potency", a workshop series that distills everything Heathcock has learned during 30 years of writing/editing/publishing/teaching. Over the years, Heathcock studied ways in which he could qualitatively evaluate his own work and the work of the writers he mentored. Through trial and error, inflation and conflation, he arrived at five conceptual truths that apply to all genres and styles of writing and can be used by any writer to evaluate and optimize their work. In this workshop, Heathcock focused on the five tenets he believes are absolutes in powerful storytelling. He delivered his findings in a series of interactive workshops open to writers of all levels and genres.
Susan Bruns is an Idaho-based writer whose essays and stories have appeared in The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, LitHub, Under the Gum Tree, The Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere.
She is the recipient of grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and the City of Boise for her writing. In 2020, she was a Surel’s Place Artist in Residence, and she was named a 2021 finalist for the Richard J. Margolis nonfiction writing award for her essay about a sibling’s struggle with mental illness and addiction.
She has an MFA in creative writing from Boise State University and degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Idaho. She has taught dozens of writing workshops to students of all ages and enjoys teaching the craft of writing and encouraging others to write their stories.
Susan grew up on a farm next to the Snake River Canyon on Idaho’s high desert and writes about how her family battled the harsh conditions, beginning with her grandparents who were homesteaders. She is the mother of two adult children and works for Fahlgren Mortine, an integrated communications agency with offices in Boise.
Natalie Disney earned her MFA in creative writing from Boise State University, where she served as Associate Editor of The Idaho Review. Her work has been published in The Florida Review and The Mississippi Review and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the PEN America Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She is a recipient of the 2017 Balch Award for fiction. Natalie teaches creative writing at Boise State University and The Cabin Center for Readers and Writers. She lives near the Boise foothills with her wife, where she is at work on her first novel.
Heidi Kraay is a playwright and writer across disciplines whose work collides myth, metaphor, and monsters to discover connections across differences. Her work has been presented locally, regionally, and internationally, including full-lengths, co-devised projects, one-acts, plays for young audiences, and shorts. Projects in other disciplines include 2 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle, a memoir-adjacent book of essays in the ancient century form forthcoming through Modern Mythographer, and Drown to Resurface, an album of poem-songs in collaboration with musician Thomas Paul. She holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry and Interdisciplinary Arts from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America through which she is beginning the Dramatists Guild Institute’s Certificate Program. Learn more at heidikraay.com
