Ten writers — poets, essayists, novelists, and memoirists — arrived in Provincetown earlier this month to begin their seven-month-long fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center. FAWC fellowship writing coordinator Laura Cresté said that the center is “interested in supporting writers at all stages of their careers”; in accordance with this mission, eight of the 10 are “emerging writers” who have not yet published a book. Two of the 10 are returning for a second fellowship season.
The application process for writers is similar to the one for fellows in the visual arts (who were introduced in last week’s Independent). Fellows are selected after several rounds of jury discussion. The poetry and fiction juries review work separately; each selects five fellows.
The 10 writers in FAWC’s 2022-23 fellowship are:
Bhion Achimba (the pen name of Chibuihe Obi Achimba) is a Nigerian poet and essayist who is currently working on an M.F.A. degree at Brown University. The founding editor of Dgëku Magazine, his work has been or will soon be published in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Harvard Review. The St. Botolph Club Foundation named Achimba one of 2021’s Emerging Artists in New England.
Willie Fitzgerald was the first-ever Mari Sabusawa Editorial Fellow at American Short Fiction. With a novel and short-story collection in the works, Fitzgerald has been published — or soon will be — in StoryQuarterly, Joyland Magazine, and Boulevard.
Kim Coleman Foote has novels in progress about the trans-Atlantic slave trade and about her own family’s journey during the Great Migration. Her work appears in The Best American Short Stories 2022, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Fiction.
Hannah Perrin King is a poet from rural California whose manuscript is a National Poetry Series finalist. Winner of the 11th Annual Poetry Contest coordinated by Narrative Magazine, King has had poems published in THRUSH Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, and the Missouri Review.
Fiction writer Gothataone Moeng, who earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, is originally from Botswana. Recipient of a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship, her work has appeared in the Oxford American and A Public Space.
Christa Romanosky is a poet, musician, and fiction writer who is returning as a FAWC fellow following her first stint in 2017-2018. Romanosky has an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Her work is about “rural spaces, trauma, and extraction,” according to FAWC’s website. It has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2021 and EPOCH Magazine.
Returning FAWC fellow John Murillo has won prizes from the Poetry Society of America, Pushcart, the NAACP, and the T.S. Eliot Foundation. Author of the poem collection Up Jump the Boogie, Murillo’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. He directs Wesleyan University’s creative writing program.
Clarisse Baleja Saïdi’s writing has been published in The Fiddlehead and Poetry, and she is now writing a novel. Hailing from Côte d’Ivoire, Saïdi has won a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. She earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan.
Kieron Walquist, a queer, neurodivergent writer and “hillbilly from Missouri,” has an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Walquist’s work appears in Bennington Review and Iron Horse Literary Review.
Poet and playwright Jorrell Watkins is a former Fulbright Japan Graduate Research Fellow with an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The prize-winning author of multiple chapbooks, Watkins contributed to the Poetry & Practice series organized by the Poetry Foundation.
Readings by the fellows, which are open to the public, will take place from February through April.
