75TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
DIAMOND ANNIVERSARY
Honoring Legacy, Community, & Leadership
LEARN • CONNECT • GROW
The Founders of The Watershed Literary Festival
Margot Clark-Junkins
Margot grew up along this coastline, not far from Wainwright House, playing year-round in the marsh next to her childhood home and swimming in Long Island Sound each summer. This landscape shaped her memories and is a major reason that she moved to Rye in 2000 with her husband and two children. This landscape also inspired the name of the literary festival that Margot helped create.
Over the years, she has had the pleasure of serving as a volunteer at many of Rye’s wonderful community organizations, providing her with valued friendships and experiences. She curated exhibits and led art tours for the Rye Arts Center, wrote for The Rye Record, and enjoyed countless other learning opportunities through the Little Garden Club of Rye, Twig Antiques, Rye TV, Jay Heritage Center, and more. In recent years, when not working on Watershed, she worked to complete a major book project. Following the Front: The Dispatches of WWII Correspondent Sidney A. Olson was published in 2024 (Bloomsbury).
Watching Watershed Literary Festival grow in size, scope, and popularity has been gratifying; we applaud Wainwright House, and all our “cousin” organizations, knowing full well that our success story could never be told without such a generous community
Paula Fung
Paula Fung earned her undergraduate degree in psychology, with minors in English and Criminal Justice, from the State University of New York at Albany and continued her education in Jamaica, Queens receiving her J.D. at St. John’s School of Law. After five years on East 21st Street practicing as a trial attorney for an insurance defense firm, she and her husband Drew settled in Rye.
She later took a turn teaching Constitutional Law at Ursuline School in New Rochelle, where she quickly discovered that addressing a classroom of high school seniors was quite a bit more challenging than arguing a case before a judge. Following the arrival of the second of their three daughters, she stepped away from professional life to focus on family and immerse herself in the Rye community, embracing volunteer opportunities throughout the school district and beyond, including work with RyeTV, the Rye Arts Center, and the Rye Free Reading Room.
Paula is the creator and producer of Writes & Bites in Rye, a local reading salon held primarily at the Rye Free Reading Room, where writers gather to share essays centered on a common theme. She also produced the public access television program Rye Views and co-hosted the podcast Cook and the Comic.
She writes personal essays about family life, reluctant sailing adventures, enthusiastic cooking projects, and attempts at respectable gardening. For several years, she served as editor of Scotch Caps, the quarterly magazine of the American Yacht Club. Her work has appeared in Sailing Anarchy, Humans of the World, Her View from Home, and Writers Read.
As a co-founder of the Watershed Literary Festival of Rye, she considers helping build a space for writers, readers, and conversation in Rye to be among the most rewarding of her community work, and she looks forward to helping make the 2027 festival especially memorable.
Alison Cupp Relyea
Alison Cupp Relyea is a writer and educator with a strong interest in history, civics, and the arts. She holds a BS in Psychology with a minor in Art History from Cornell University and an MSEd in Museum Education from Bank Street College. She taught elementary school for many years in New York City before moving to Rye, where she worked at the Rye Historical Society as the Director of Education and Programming for five years. Alison served as a committee member and co-chair of Heard in Rye, a role that combined her career in education with her interest in community building. Alison was a 2023 recipient of the Port Chester-Rye NAACP Freedom Award and is a co-founder of pRYEde, a nonprofit community group that focuses on LGBTQ+ advocacy. She served on the board of the Rye YMCA, is currently a board member of Save the Sound, and serves as the chair of the City of Rye Landmarks Advisory Committee.
Alison is a contributing writer for the Rye Record and an adjunct writing professor at St. Thomas Aquinas College. She published an essay collection called Soundtrack: Liner Notes from a Pandemic Mixtape (2023) and has published work in many online journals. She is grateful for the support and encouragement of her weekly writing group and monthly book club. Alison is a co-founder of Watershed Literary Festival in Rye. Watershed has been an amazing way to foster connections and create something new, and Alison looks forward to planning the lineup for 2027!
Siân Roath
Siân’s career has been shaped by a longstanding commitment to widening access to ideas, culture, and justice. Her professional life has combined a dedication to human rights and public service with a deep engagement in the visual and literary arts.
After completing her law degree in England, she began her career in publishing, working as an editor in London before returning to the legal profession as a human rights lawyer. During this period, she also pursued a Master’s degree in art history, reflecting her enduring interest in the role of the arts in public and intellectual life.
Since moving to Rye in 2012, Siân has become actively involved in the local arts community. She serves on the Rye Arts Center’s Gallery Committee, has co-chaired its art tours, and writes on museums and galleries for the expatriate community. Alongside this work, she continues to provide pro bono legal support.
While raising her triplets in Rye and becoming immersed in the life of the community, Siân recognized the town’s remarkable concentration of readers, writers, book clubs, and creative energy. Having attended literary festivals in England for many years, she felt Rye would be an ideal setting for one of its own. That early idea evolved into Watershed, which she helped bring to life alongside a dedicated founding team and the wider Rye community.
Since its launch in 2021, Watershed Literary Festival has grown into a vibrant celebration of contemporary writing and ideas, bringing together authors, poets, journalists, readers, and aspiring writers from Rye and beyond. For Siân, the festival has created an ongoing opportunity to foster conversation, creativity, and community connection through literature.