Welcoming Year Two of the Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler Writer’s Residency

Friends of the San Francisco Public Library is thrilled to announce the second class of writers chosen for the Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler Writer’s Residency. These five writers will spend the year using the Friends’ office to work on their projects and partner with five library branches to share their talents with the community. Residents began moving into the office in October and have made the space their own. One Resident brought in a ceramic donut and unicorn painted by his children, which inspired another Resident in her writing. Follow along on Twitter or Instagram (@FriendsSFPL) for a front-row seat to this year’s Residents in action. 

​2010-2020 Brown Handler Writers Residents:

Earle McCartney’s short stories have appeared in ZZYZVA, The Common, Meridian, Big Fiction and The Greensboro Review. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a recipient of The San Francisco Foundation’s 2013 Joseph Henry Jackson Award. A native of rural southern New Jersey, Earle has lived in San Francisco for the last twelve years.

Amanda Moore’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review and Best New Poets, and her essays have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Hippocampus Magazine and on the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog. She is a Contributing Poetry Editor at Women’s Voices for Change, a Board member for the Marin Poetry Center and a high school teacher. Amanda lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset with her husband and daughter.

Mia Paschal is an actress and playwright who moved to San Francisco from Milan, Italy to study with Ed Hooks. Along with her ensemble theater and film work, she has written and performed four awardwinning solo shows: some life, This Lily Was (Fontana), Along the Path of Larks and Swallow and Heartbreak Velocity. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California have also commissioned her to write site-specific works, My Jim Dine Valentine and Trevlig. Writing in Italian, French, Danish and English, her poetry will next be featured in the winter issue of The Copenhagen Review.

Maddy Raskulinecz is a fiction writer from Maryland, now living in San Francisco. Her fiction has appeared in ZZYZVA, Guernica, Joyland, Tin House Online and elsewhere, and was recently included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University.

Shruti Swamy is the winner of two O. Henry Awards. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, the Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fiction fellow, a 2017–2018 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University and a recipient of a 2018 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her story collection, A House Is a Body, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in August.

Last year’s Brown Handler Residents published their first books, received offers from literary agents, published in national publications including the New York Times and Departures magazine and presented their work at the Friends’ Lit Crawl Event in at the Mission Branch Library. The generosity of Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) provided free and accessible studio space in which to work, and a deeper connection to writers, librarians and our library community. Reflecting the Library’s mission as a democratic, public and accessible institution, Friends is committed to supporting writers from a wide spectrum of ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation and genre. For more information and to find out more about the projects the residents are working on, visit friendssfpl.org/residency.