The Hugo House has announced the names of their new writers-in-residence for the next year or two.

Angela Jane Fountas is a writer of both short fiction and non-fiction. She has a story, titled “Queendom,” online at Pindelyboz. Here’s the opening:

A bomb drops on Myrtle, Iowa. It was only a matter of time. Mothers make do with what’s left in their cupboards; they milk cows and collect eggs. Sorghum fields go to ruin and root cellars overflow. Winter is imminent.

“We won’t go hungry,” Frances says. Her father is gone. All the men are gone. They are in the sky and on the ground. Some have fallen already.

“Quiet, hush,” her mother says.

It’s a good, disturbing story.

And Ed Skoog, whose name I will say aloud many, many times over the next two years, is the other writer in residence. He’s a poet who has lived in Montana, California, and New Orleans. His lovely poem, Bela, is here. Here’s a stanza from that poem:

Several years later, to the publicity dept.

at Imperial Studio, in answer to a questionnaire,

he became Bela Lugosi, twenty-eight,

six-one and blue eyed as a Wichita quarterback.

High spots of life? “It is no one’s business.”

He was unwilling to share his beauty secrets.

Congratulations to Fountas and Ed Skoog. These are both great choices. There will be an event to celebrate their arrival in October, and I can’t wait to see what they produce, along with the Hugo House’s Belltown writers in residence, Storme Webber and Cienna Madrid. It should be an exciting couple of years for the Hugo House.