Conference Staff
The Cherry Tree Young Writers’ Conference is run by the staff of the Rose O’Neill
Literary House, with the help of some of Washington College’s most talented undergraduate
creative writers: the Conference Interns.
ROY KESEY: CONFERENCE DIRECTOR
Roy Kesey’s latest books are the short story collection Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books), the novel Pacazo (Dzanc Books/Jonathan Cape), and his translations of Pola Oloixarac’s novels Savage Theories and Dark Constellations (Soho Press). He is the winner of an NEA grant for fiction and a PEN/Heim grant for translation. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction.
Roy currently serves as Associate Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House, Associate
Editor of Cherry Tree, Director of the Cherry Tree Young Writers' Conference, and Lecturer in English and
Creative Writing.
JAMES ALLEN HALL: ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
James Allen Hall (he/they) is the author of two books of poems: Now You’re the Enemy (2008, U of Arkansas Press)--which won awards from the Texas Institute, the Lambda Literary Foundation, and the Fellowship
of Southern Writers--and Romantic Comedy, which won the Levis Prize and was published in 2023 by Four Way Books. They are also
the author of a book of lyric personal essays called I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well. They are Associate Professor of English at Washington College and Director of the
Rose O’Neill Literary House. 
AMBER TALIANCICH: CONFERENCE COORDINATOR
Amber Taliancich is from the Mississippi Gulf Coast and earned her MFA from the Northeast
Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Cleveland, Ohio. She's the winner of the Leonard Trawick
Prize for fiction. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Pinch, Entropy, Hobart, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere.
LINDA HAMRICK: CONFERENCE ASSISTANT
Linda Hamrick holds an MA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University. As an academic, she specializes in contemporary Sci-Fi and is interested in the posthumanities and the medical humanities. She has been previously published in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal and in AI & Society, and was a Graduate Fellow for the VCU Humanities Research Center's Health Humanities Lab. She hopes to continue exploring the dehumanized labor of care work in artificial intelligence.
JUSTIN NASH: Print Shop Fellow
Justin Nash is a poet and visual artist from Delaware. A former intern of Copper Canyon Press and the Fine Arts Work Center, he currently serves as a senior reader in Poetry for Cherry Tree and recently completed his MFA at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
CONFERENCE INTERNS:
All of our Conference Interns are Washington College students. They work closely with conference participants in the creative writing workshops, lectures, and craft talks. They are in charge of runnning many of the evening activities, staffing a panel and presentation, and holding their own reading during the Conference.