The enthusiasm, knowledge, and sensitivity of our staff is part of what makes Juniper great. They make our programming fun and inclusive, bringing their own curiosity and exploratory nature as writers into the mix. Staff develop, lead, and participate in carefully-designed semester-long trainings which emphasize creative writing pedagogy, developing an interactive classroom, mentoring in a residence-life environment, and curating strategies for supporting students away from home. They've collaborated to create the online program's schedule and operations, and work together to supplement Juniper's basic curricula with write-alongs, write-ins and writing challenges. They work year-round to shepherd the Juniper experience into being. Please don't hesitate to reach out to the team!
Betsy Wheeler, Director (she/her)
Betsy Wheeler is the author of the poetry collection Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room and the poetry chapbooks Start Here and Mental Detours. She earned her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University in 2005, and held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University from 2005-2007. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Windfall Room, The Journal, Bat City Review, Better, MiPoesias, Forklift Ohio and elsewhere. She lives with her wife and kiddo in Amherst, MA.
Porter Lunceford, Managing Director (he/him and they/them)
Porter Lunceford is a queer writer from northern Utah. Porter holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and teaches college writing.
Vika Mujumdar, Assistant Director (she/her)
Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Western Massachusetts. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. She teaches writing and works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
Montanna Harling, Assistant Director (she/her)
Montanna Harling is an MFA in Prose candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she specializes in speculative eco-fiction. She attended the 2024 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and has a BA with Honors in Literature and Writing from UC San Diego. Montanna’s writing has been published in F(r)iction Magazine and Small Wonders Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2022 Saier Memorial Award in Fiction, and both the 2023 and 2024 Art and Sustainability Fellowships at UMass Amherst.
Photograph by Kristina Davini Photography.
Noy Holland, Creative Director and Co-founder (she/her)
Noy Holland received the Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books include I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, New and Selected Stories; the novel Bird; and three collections of short fiction—Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published fiction and essays in Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Antioch, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Believer, and NOON, among others. She is a co-founder and Creative Director of the Juniper Institute, and a partner in the collaborative interdisciplinary series Art Sustainability Activism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Jeff Parker, Creative Director (he/him)
Jeff Parker is the author of several books including Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal, the novel Ovenman, and the short story collection The Taste of Penny. His many collaborative books and anthologies include: Clean Rooms, Low Rates, Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion: The Poetry of Sportstalk; A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors; Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia; Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States; and The Back of the Line. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Tin House, and others. He teaches prose in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he is the Co-Founder and Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.
Jennifer Jacobson, Director of Community Engagement & Alumni Relations (she/her)
Jennifer Jacobson is Director of Community Engagement & Alumni Relations for the MFA for Poets & Writers at UMass Amherst and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. She founded the nonprofit organization When Children Save the Day to unite language arts and social action. Her work has been honored with a Creative Teaching Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Storytelling Network’s Brimstone Award for transformative community projects, along with support from the Solidago Foundation and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. Her short story “Heat” received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and “Trouble and Bones” was a Tennessee Williams Festival’s Fiction contest finalist. Jennifer teaches creative writing at Smith College’s Young Women’s Writing Workshop, and with Voices from Inside, created the Family Storybook Project curriculum for incarcerated women and their children.