We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Eric Tanyavutti, Liz Iversen, Jared Jackson, Mimi Lok, and Krista Knight.
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.
ERIC TANYAVUTTI - JANUARY 2024
Eric Tanyavutti works as a writer for a NY-based advertising agency, and lives in Evanston, IL with his wife and three children.
He has earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Illinois. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines such as Blackbird, cream city review, The Tusculum Review, and Southeast Review. He's also the recipient of the Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Award in Short Fiction and has served as a Callaloo Fellow.
About his project: Eric will be working on completing a YA novel.
LIZ IVERSEN - MARCH 2024
Liz Iversen has received support from Tin House, Aspen Words, Monson Arts, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Fourteen Hills, Passages North, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and elsewhere. The daughter of a former U.S. Navy private and a Filipina immigrant, Liz was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Dakota. She lives in Maine and is an MFA candidate at Antioch University. Find her online at Liziversen.com.
About her project: Liz’s historical novel AFTER THE SAVIORS, is set in Japanese-occupied Philippines. Seventeen-year-old Liwayway seeks vengeance as a Huk guerrilla after her father is brutally murdered by occupying forces and her sister, Malaya, is kidnapped and forced to serve as a comfort woman. Told in the sisters’ alternating perspectives, AFTER THE SAVIORS explores hidden avenues of the past to reveal the strength of Filipino women and the power of familial love.
JARED JACKSON - MARCH 2024
Jared Jackson is a writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator born in Hartford, CT. His writing has been published in the Best American Short Stories 2023, New York Times Book Review, Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, n+1, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships from MacDowell (’21, ’23), Yaddo (’22, ’24), Center for Fiction, Baldwin for the Arts, Tin House, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Writer's Block Residency. He was a finalist for the 2023 Granum Foundation Prize. He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University.
About his project: Jared will be working on a short story collection titled LOCALS. Though the characters and the stories in the collection are fictional, the streets, roads, and avenues are real. The landmarks, bus lines, and parks are real. The restaurants, smells, and sounds of the city are real. His intention: to create a world that the reader can enter. The stories in the collection are loosely but distinctly connected, asking thematic questions about love, race, neglect, loyalty, and community, among other items. The collection aims to explore questions such as: How do we learn to take better care of other? How do our communities raise us? How can we imagine a better future? His aim is to create stories and characters that leap off the page straight into the reader’s memory and consciousness. He aims to give his characters’ lives complexity and singularity, and hope to generate something rarer and more valuable than sympathy in the reader — compassion, understanding, recognition.
MIMI LOK - APRIL 2024
Mimi Lok is the author of Last Of Her Name, which won a PEN/Bingham Award for debut story collection and a California Book Award silver medal for first fiction. She is also the recipient of a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress, fellowships from MacDowell and Hambidge, and is a National Magazine Award and Northern California Book Award finalist. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, the Believer, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. For almost fifteen years, Mimi was the executive director and executive editor of Voice of Witness a human rights/oral history nonprofit she cofounded that amplifies the voices of people impacted by—and fighting against—injustice.
About her project: She is currently working on a novel.
KRISTA KNIGHT - MAY 2024
Krista is a Juilliard Fellow, Page 73 Playwriting Fellow, MacDowell Fellow, Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Vineyard Theatre, Vanderbilt Writer-in-Residence, Chance Theater Resident Playwright, and winner of the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Broadway on Demand Film Festival.
Plays include SLOPPY BONNIE (Nashville Scene Critics Pick, Princess Grace Finalist), CRUSH (NYTimes Recommended, TimeOut Best Theater to Stream Online, featured in American Theatre Magazine, streaming on the Emmy App), LIPSTICK LOBOTOMY (Kilroys List, Trap Door Theatre), DON’T STOP ME – a musical with Dave Malloy (YMTC, Manhattan School of Music), KIRK AT THE SF AIRPORT HYATT (NYTW’s Residency, Vineyard reading), PRIMAL PLAY (New Georges), SELKIE (Williamstown Workshop, Dutch Kills) and CRIMSON LIT: SCARLET LETTER SET LIST – a musical with Jill Sobule (Polyphone Festival, Chance Theatre).
Commissions include the script for a ride at Tokyo Disney, The Steinmetz Lab, an EST/Sloan Commission, and DreamWorks/Music Theatre International.
BA: Brown University. MA: Performance Studies from NYU. MFA Playwriting: UCSD.
www.KristaKnight.com
About her project: This play follows how three urban planners’ unique gender performances shape competing urban landscapes. It will be an examination of a woman’s place and the places woman creates.