Yellow Studio Residents
Winter/Spring 2025 Residents
Eileen Moskowitz-Palma, a former elementary school teacher, is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College’s The Writing Institute, where she subsequently taught novel writing for seven years. Eileen has combined her love of teaching and writing to bring virtual and in-person writing programs to kids through partnerships with public libraries and the Girl Scouts. School Library Journal called Camp Clique, the first book in Eileen’s middle grade series, “a powerful middle grade novel about the difficulty of both forgiveness and trust, as well as the nature of true friendship.” The sequel, School Squad, drives home the point that authentic friendship is more important than fitting in. Eileen is currently enrolled in Emerson College’s MFA in Popular Fiction and Publishing program, where she was awarded the 2024 Popular Fiction Page Turner Prize.
Eileen Moskowitz-Palma
Author-in-Residence
Susan Sawyers is a multimedia artist, former reporter and New York City native. Her current work traces the lives of flower farmers and their blooms. The #letterproject explores identity and partnerships through the lives of five generations of women.
A graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, International Center of Photography and Grinnell College. She began her career as a legislative aide and French teacher in Washington, D.C. She taught English and wrote for a local newspaper as a Fulbright-Hayes Teaching Assistant in Paimpol, France, was an assistant vice president at Christie’s in New York and Los Angeles until she was named curator and then director of LA’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. After graduate school, she produced Bloomberg Radio’s Bloomberg EDU, Bloomberg Radio’s award-winning weekly look at education. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Bloomberg News, the New York Times, USA Today, The Huffington Post, The Hechinger Report and New York Social Diary.
She serves on the boards of Studio in a School, the New York Women’s Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She lives in New York City with her physician/scientist partner Charles L. Sawyers. They also have a home in Waccabuc, NY.
The mother of two grown children, she lives near Central Park with her physician/scientist husband Charles. She’s visited 45 states and hopes to see the remaining five by the end of 2025.
Susan Sawyers
Artist-in-Residence
Aimee Pokwatka is the author of the novels Self-Portrait with Nothing and The Parliament. Born and raised in West Virginia, she studied anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and received her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her short fiction has been published in Fairy Tale Review, Outlook Springs, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She lives in Cross River with her family.
