2026 | Maine Artist Fellowship | Literary Arts Fellow

Artist Statement:

Mira Ptacin is a first-generation proud daughter of a Polish immigrant, a lineage that shapes her work as a narrative journalist, essayist, and memoirist. Her projects move through the sublime and the transformational, driven by a devotion to telling deeply human stories that challenge prevailing ideas about equity, inclusion, compassion, responsibility, and the systems that govern our lives in Maine and beyond. With an unwavering commitment to activism, she uncovers the complexities behind headlines and amplifies voices often overlooked by mainstream narratives, always in pursuit of justice and transcendence. Mira reportage ranges from the lives of incarcerated women to rural Maine feminist mystics to neo-Nazis and the townsfolk who rid their community of them. With the support of the Maine Arts Commission, she continues to research, report, and tell the in-depth true stories of real Mainers, the salt of the earth. Ptacin serves on the board of Reentry Sisters, Maine-based nonprofit that supports women transitioning from incarceration back into society, offering community, resources, education, and radical amounts of practical care.

Bio:

Mira Ptacin is an award-winning journalist, memoirist, and educator. She is the author of Poor Your Soul, as well as The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums and Legends of Camp Etna. Her writing has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atavist, and LitHub among other outlets. For over a decade, she has taught memoir and flash nonfiction workshops in both traditional and nontraditional spaces, including inside prisons, where she leads long-running writing programs for incarcerated women.

On winning a Maine Artist Fellowship:

Receiving the Maine Artist Fellowship feels like both an exhale and a steady hand at my back. It gives me time, resources, and permission to keep digging into the hard, human stories I'm already chasing, but with more rigor and reach, supporting the research, travel, and reporting that shapes my work across the state. It also feels quietly miraculous to know that people care about my work, that it is being seen and held beyond my own desk and doubts. The fellowship reminds me that stories do not live in isolation, and that kind of faith from a community changes how bravely you work.