Staff & Board

Nickole Brown  is the author of  Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book,  Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries.  Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals.  To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a  chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.  She first attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in 2004 and returned nearly every year thereafter as either a participant or mentor. In 2021, she began envisioning the next iteration of the festival with founder Miles Coon and became President in 2022. Not too long after, she renamed the festival the Hellbender Gathering of Poets after an Eastern Hellbender named Meatloaf that she fell in love with while volunteering at the Western North Carolina Nature Center. You can visit her personal website here.

Jennifer Coon is an Art Therapist and Psychologist, working and living in the Boston area. She was inspired into poetry by her father, Miles Coon, who founded the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Relatively new to writing poetry, she attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival as a participant for the first time in 2017.  In addition, she served on its board for over 15 years.  Her work has been published in the South Florida Poetry Journal.  

Zoë Fay-Stindt was Hellbender’s second Fellow. They are a queer, bicontinental poet and essayist, raised by both the swamps of eastern Carolina and the rivers of Languedoc, France. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They are a student of belonging and embodied relationship to land who believes in slowness, reciprocal relationship with place and people, and queer, kincentric futures. 

Alison Granucci is a poet and naturalist living in the Hudson Valley. In 2005, she founded Blue Flower Arts, the first literary speaker’s agency in this country to represent poets, and for fifteen years worked with some of the most acclaimed poets in the country for their appearances. During that time, she also curated several Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers Conferences at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Upon retiring in 2020, Alison began to write poetry herself—much to her surprise and delight. Her work is now published or forthcoming in RHINO, Terrain.org, About Place Journal, EcoTheo Review, Plant-Human Quarterly, Subnivean Journal (Poetry Award finalist), Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Great River Review, The Dewdrop, and an anthology of bird poems, Little by Little, the Bird Builds Its Nest, by Paris Morning Publications. Alison’s awards include an Artist-in-residence at Trail Wood, homestead of naturalist Edwin Way Teale (2023), and the first annual Vicious Circle Award from The Poetry Society of New York (2022) for her contributions to the world of poetry.  She currently serves as a reader for The Rumpus and is at work on a full-length poetry collection. You can visit her personal website here.

James Lenfestey has published thirteen volumes of poems, essays, anthologies, and a memoir. He had a long and thriving career in  academia, marketing, communications, and journalism. He was on the editorial board of the StarTribune, where he won several Page One awards for excellence. For fifteen years, he chaired the Literary Witnesses poetry program in Minneapolis  and led a summer poetry class on Mackinac Island, Michigan. In 2020 he received the Kay Sexton Award for significant contributions and leadership in the Minnesota Literary Community. In 2024, Milkweed Editions published his eighth poetry collection, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements.  He lives in Minneapolis with his wife. They have four children and ten grandchildren. You can visit his personal website here.

Arielle Hebert is Hellbender’s third and current Fellow. She’s a queer poet based in North Carolina with roots in Florida and Louisiana. Her debut poetry collection, Bottom Feeders, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in June 2026. She holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, Grist, Great River Review, Nimrod, and Redivider, among others. You can visit her personal website here.

Marie Kressin was Hellbender’s very first Fellow, back when we were just getting on our feet. She did so much for us, and since then, she’s gone on to do so much more! She’s a graduate of Hendrix College and earned her MFA from the University of the South. She has been published in Arkansas's Best Emerging Poets, SLANT, The Arkansas International, Timber, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Marie was selected as Dairy Hollow’s 2023 Moondancer Fellow. Her poem “Dead Bird’s Skull” was nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net award, and she is the Acquisitions Manager for April Gloaming Publishing in Nashville. She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Hendrix College.