We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our first two Silberstein Fellows, Lue Palmer and Manjula Menon. Our third fellow for the summer will be Jean Kyoung Frazier.
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.
The Silberstein Fellowship was created to support emerging speculative fiction writers, sponsored by author Eric Silberstein. Eric is an engineer from Harvard turned fiction writer, and his exciting debut The Insecure Mind of Sergei Kraev, set in the not-too-distant future, imagines a harrowing technological future where neural implants have become widespread.
Special thanks again to Nevada Humanities, UNLV, Eric Silberstein, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Lue Palmer - July 2022
Lue is a writer of literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry on Black relationships to nature, the fantastic in the everyday, and the retelling of history among other things. Lue Palmer is a child of the Jamaican diaspora stretching across Canada, the UK, US and the Caribbean. With a bush country heritage, Lue was fed on stories and raised by a river in the north. Published in North America and the Caribbean, Lue is a Bread Loaf Writing Conference alumni, and a Banff Centre Writers’ Studio Artist in Residence alumni.
About their project: Their first full-length work, The Hungry River, follows a woman who loses her child and climbs into the sky to slap God. Set on the backdrop of climate change, and the fight of a community against environmental racism—A Hungry River chronicles a love song between nature and Black communities over 250 years and into the future.
Manjula Menon - August
Manjula Menon is a writer of literary and speculative fiction. Her awards include a Yaddo Fellowship and a Breadloaf Writers Conference“waitership”. Her short stories have been published in Pleiades, Tampa Review and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her most recent publication is a story/recipe in the forthcoming collection of fantastical mixology, Strange Libations: Dark Cocktails from the editors of ApexMagazine.
About her project: I will be working on revising and polishing my first novel.
Christopher “C-Bone Jones” - September
Christopher “C-Bone Jones” was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. At the age of 16, he experienced a life-threating car accident which propelled him head first through the windshield. After plastic surgery, he was ashamed of the numerous facial scars resulting from the car accident but understood he was blessed to still be alive. C-Bone became determined to share his story in the hopes of inspiring someone else to embrace life and all that comes along with its experiences. A natural performer, he believes it’s his life experiences and triumph which inspires him to share his story through film, poetry or spoken-word artistry. C-Bone became a student of his craft. After studying film, television production and mass communication at Tennessee State University, he returned to his native Los Angeles to start a full service production company. On a leap of faith, C-Bone invested his savings into his dream: Bread N Butter Productions.
C-Bone fell in love with the art of spoken word the very first time he stepped on stage. He was happy to have found a creative platform to display his skills. The feeling was euphoric. Amazed at how his natural talent of word play could captivate an audience, he became inspired to continue writing. His first performance would go on to be one of many to come.
A lyrical wordsmith, C-Bone Jones is a twenty year veteran of the spoken-word industry. Best known for his closing moniker, “Ya’ll, like that?” His iconic phrase has become synonymous with the closing of a poet’s performance throughout the United States. A seasoned industry veteran, he has been lauded as the official Poet for Tupac’s Legendary Outlawz. In addition, he has had the opportunity to share the stage with such legendary greats such as: Malcolm Jamal Warner, Kim Fields, Teena Marie, Jessica Care Moore, Dead Prez, Georgia Me, Saul Williams and Mack 10, Jurassic 5, and Jon., B. C-Bone has appeared as a weekly feature on LA’s KJLH 102.3 FM, his work has been captured on BET’s Life Tracks and Russell Simmons’s HBO Def Poetry Jam. He has recorded numerous Spoken Word c.d.s and has directed several Spoken Word themed narrative short films. A 2010 Film School graduate, C-Bone remains focused on the development of new ideation and the production of full length feature films as well as cornering the market on Spoken Word themed narrative shorts. C-Bone is passionate about new projects such as his first digital CD entitled Mont Blanc Music as well his #SpitAVerseChangeALife clothing line and the continued movement towards the development of sound spoken word projects that evoke thought and change lives.
About his project: Writers Block Sin City is a docu-film which takes a detailed look into the spoken word poetry scene in Las Vegas. We discuss the many obstacles poets have to overcome to be a successful poet for example, Venue Etiquette, Poets going Mainstream and the Poet vs the Promoter.
helen shewolfe tseng - September
Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer, and witch born to Taiwanese immigrants in the Deep South and currently based in San Francisco. Their work is influenced by ancestral and diasporic relationships to place, folk spiritual practices, interspecies collaborations, trickster archetypes, and neurodivergence, and has taken the forms of drawings, paintings, books and zines, writing, rituals, talismans, talks, workshops, installations, participatory works, computational works, and combinations of the above. Previously, Helen was a 2022 Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center, a 2018-2019 Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the 2019 Designer in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, and the illustrator and co-author of The Astrological Grimoire (Chronicle Books). For more signs of life, see shewolfe.co and instagram.com/wolfchirp.