The Writer-In-Residence (WIR) program is an initiative founded by ArtRoot, supported by the Racine Literacy Council and funded by the Osborne and Scekic Family Foundation. Through this program, ArtRoot seeks to spotlight Racine and Kenosha’s dynamic literary community while encouraging, supporting, and advocating on behalf of writers at all stages of their careers.

Writers are in residence for 6 month terms and receive a stipend of $1,500. During their residency, each writer generates a weekly blog post on a variety of topics. The post is published on the WIR site at:

https://racinewir.com/

If you would like to receive email notifications about new blog posts from the Writer in Residence, please go to any post and click on the Subscribe button in the lower right corner that shows up if you scroll up anywhere in the post.

The current WIR is Jay Mollerskov, a writer and a musician. An active member of our local arts community, he teaches guitar, piano, and music composition along with organizing poetry and experimental music performances in Racine and Milwaukee. He is a graduate of UW-Milwaukee where he studied music composition and technology, as well as instrumental performance.

Jay hosts a bi-monthly poetry reading at Vintage & Modern Books in Racine and during his tenure as Writer-in-Residence, he hopes to encourage collaboration and creativity in our writing community.

Jay Mollerskov

Racine Writer-in-Residence
January 2026 - June 2026

 

Applications for the WIR are accepted every 6 months. Application information can be found at https://racinewir.com/applications/.