We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Alice Sola Kim, Sil Hamilton, Yilin Wang, and Davin Malasarn.
Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment next to Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.
Our apartment is in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.
Special thanks again to Nevada Humanities, UNLV, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Alice sola kim - october 2023
Alice Sola Kim's fiction has appeared in publications such as The Cut, Tin House, McSweeney's, Lightspeed, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is a 2016 Whiting Award winner and has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
About her project: Short Fiction.
Sil Hamilton - october 2023
Sil Hamilton is AI researcher-in-residence at Hacks/Hackers, a network of journalists who rethink the future of news through talks, hackathons, and conferences. A machine learning researcher at McGill University exploring the intersection of AI and culture, Sil has published research at NLP conferences like ACL, AAAI, and COLING. His work exploring the limits of language models has been discussed by Wired, The Financial Times, and Le Devoir. Sil has given talks on AI and the newsroom at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia; the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; and The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Sil has consulted for The Associated Press on AI policies and serves as technology advisor at Health Tech Without Borders, a non-profit seeking to mitigate healthcare crises with digital tools.
Yilin Wang - November 2023
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a writer, poet, Chinese-English translator, and editor who lives on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples (Metro Vancouver, Canada). Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Toronto Star, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Guernica, Room, Asymptote, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” Samovar, and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, been nominated for an Aurora Award and Rhysling Award, been a two-time finalist for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction, and been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop.
About her project: Sparrow and Other Stories is a book-length short story collection that retells Chinese folktales through a feminist, queer, and Sino diaspora lens. The stories often experiment with genre and form and are inspired by various literary traditions such as ghost stories, chuanyue (time travel) narratives, wuxia fiction, and xianxia fiction.
Davin malasarn - December 2023
Davin Malasarn is a Los Angeles native and a biologist-turned-writer. He was a recipient of a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship and earned his M.F.A. in creative writing from Bennington College. His debut novel, tentatively titled THE OUTER COUNTRY, will be published in 2025 through One World/Random House. He has published short stories in the Los Angeles Review, Rosebud, Opium Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and other journals in print and online.
About his project: Davin Malasarn’s THE OUTER COUNTRY is a multigenerational debut novel following two sisters’ migration from Phet Buri, Thailand, to Monterey Park, California, and their struggle under the same roof for the love of one sister’s son, Ben, who eventually charts his own path as he comes-of-age and grows into his queerness. It is a fiercely Thai—and American—story unpacking the betrayals we make for love and the debts that can never be repaid.