writer-IN-RESIDENCE
June 10-24, 2026
Somto Ihezue
Somto Ihezue is a writer and filmmaker. He is an MFA fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland. His writing exists at the intersection of boyhood, land, and disruption in Igbo communities. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Poetry Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Flash Fiction Online, and others. He has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Tin House, Clarion West, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and more. He was assistant editor of the Publishing Taught Me Anthology (SFWA & NEA) and co-editor of Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology.
Artist Statement
I intend to approach my time at Good Hart as a conversation. Rather than arriving with a fixed narrative, I am interested in learning how to listen: to the landscape and the ways scientific observation attempts to translate nonhuman life into legible forms. My practice is rooted in attention to bodies and lands as archives, and Good Hart offers an opportunity to expand that lens beyond cultural memory into ecological memory. At Good Hart, I hope to let the landscape complicate, while challenging my thinking and writing process. The stories that come forth would hopefully be shaped by proximity, failure, listening, and the slow ethics of staying with the land long enough for it to answer back.