Welcoming Our 2024-2025 Spring Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Emily Wilson, Naomi Krupitsky, and guests Gladys Lu and Marie Nguyen.

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.

emily wilson - march 2025

Emily Wilson is a writer in San Francisco. For years, she taught adults at City College of San Francisco getting their high school diplomas, so subjects like Civics, History, Writing and Literature. Now she writes and hosts a podcast of short conversations with artists with a Bay Area connection.
Wilson writes for various outlets including Hyperallergic, San Francisco Classical Voice, KQED, Triangle Magazine, Artsy, the Creative Independent, San Francisco Public Press, Next Avenue, Women's Media Center, and Alta Journal, as well as a regular gig writing for the California Federation of Teachers.

About her project: Emily will be working on the podcast as well as a couple articles during her time at the residency.

Naomi krupitsky - march 2025

Naomi Krupitsky was born in Berkeley, California, and attended New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she graduated in 2012. Her debut novel, The Family, was an instant New York Times Best Seller and has been translated into eleven languages. She lives in San Francisco with her family, where she is at work on her second novel.

About her project: Naomi will be working on her second novel.

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Gladys lu - april 2025

Gladys Lu is a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker based in San Francisco. Born and raised in Suzhou, China, and having lived on both the East and West Coasts of the United States, her work explores land, the natural world, cultural traditions, and her personal and collective diaspora experience. As a writer and translator, she writes in both English and Chinese. She writes essays, prose, poetry, and biographies.

As a photographer, she shoots landscapes and portraiture. In her alternative printing practice, she approaches imagery with an analog and organic process. She uses expired film rolls and instant film as canvas, and incorporates natural forces such as sunlight, water, and plants as developers for her image. She also goes into her pantry and experiments with ingredients including salt, vinegar, alcohol, baking soda… The dialogue around impermanence and eco-friendly elements is the fuel of her curiosity as a visual artist.

About their project: Gladys will be working on projects for WikiPortraits, focusing on celebrities and artist in downtown Vegas, as well as a poetry translation project. This will be a bilingual English-Chinese collection featuring translations of the poetry from 4 poets from Suzhou & Eastern China, the River cities across Tang and Song dynasties (619-1279). These authentic translations explore the natural world, nomadic traditions, and romance among the writers and scholars.

Marie nguyen - april 2025

Marie Hanhnhon Nguyen is an award-winning Vietnamese writer and filmmaker. She was born in Saigon and moved to California with her family when she was five.
Marie is a Black List and WIF Screenwriters Lab fellow. She is a 2021 Sundance IDP Fellow and grantee. Her screen work includes Netfiix's BEEF, Peacock's A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, and the upcoming shows THE DECAMERON and RESET. She has film and television projects in development with A24 and Amazon. Marie is an alumni of the WGA Showrunner Training Program. In 2024, Marie won a WGA award for Best Limited Series for her work on BEEF.
Her play, Ten and a Half, was selected for the Sundance Institute and CTG Playwriting Intensive in 2019 and was a winner of the 2020 Hollywood Fringe Scholarship. Ten and a Half was also a finalist for the 2020 SWTP Rising Artist Competition and Attic Salt Theatre Company Playwriting Competition.

About her project: Marie will be finishing a feature script about an ensemble of characters living in San Gabriel Valley. The central story is about an estranged father and son who have to reunite and work together after a disastrous, financial mishap.

Welcoming Our 2024-2025 Winter Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Lindsey Webb, Jenn Alann Trahan, and guests Makiko Hirata and Leslie Oh.

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.

LINDSEY WEBB - DECember 2024

Lindsey Webb is the author of 'Plat' (Archway Editions, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and two chapbooks: 'House' and 'Perfumer's Organ'. Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Graduate Research Fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books.

About her project: Lindsey will be working on a book of essays entitled 'Saccades,' about land art and land use in the American West.

JENN ALANN TRAHAN - JANUARY 2025

Jenn Alandy Trahan was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in Fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Jenn's writing has been supported by the Carlisle Family Scholarship at the Community of Writers, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, a Writing Downtown Fellowship in Las Vegas, Nevada, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and a La Baldi Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She is also grateful to Blue Mesa Review, Harper's, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories for featuring her work. Jenn is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she has taught undergraduate courses in fiction, nonfiction, Filipinx fiction, creative expression, and service-learning through creative writing; she's also taught Writer's Studio workshops on writing about class, race, and sports.

About her project: Jenn will be finishing a collection of short stories and starting a new book.

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Makiko hirata - january 2025

An international pianist with ten released albums, Makiko Hirata is “Dr. Pianist,” on a mission to promote the power of music to heal and unite us. She collaborates with neuroscientists to quantify the benefit of music and promote it as an overlooked resource to enhance our individual and social well-being through speaking engagements, workshop and writing. She has taught at New York University, Colburn Conservatory of Music, Rice University, and Lone Star College, and is an instructor for Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education and a staff pianist at the Colburn Conservatory of Music. She is a US-Japan Leadership Program fellow, and a Shigeru Kawai Artist. More on Makiko at: musicalmakiko.com/en

About her project: Dr. Hirata will be working on a research memoir titled Mermaid’s Soul: Reclaiming My Voice as an Asian Pianist. The memoir uses her story as a young Japanese pianist to share her insights and research findings.

Leslie oh - february 2025

Leslie Hsu Oh is an outdoor writer with a degree in biology, ethnobotany, MFA in creative nonfiction and public health from Harvard. Her award-winning writing and photography appear in Adventure Journal (NATJA gold), Alaska (Writer’s Digest award), Alpinist (gold medal in Outdoor and Adventure Photography), Backpacker (silver), Conde Nast Traveler, First Alaskans (1st in Environmental Reporting with Alaska Press Club), Fourth Genre (Solas Awards), National Geographic (silver), Outside (gold and silver), Parents Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Saveur (won Lowell Thomas), Smithsonian (silver), Sierra (gold), Travel + Leisure (two golds), Washington Post (silver), Vogue (gold).

About her project: Fireweed: A Memoir is a story about making sense of this world when you lose everything that made sense. It’s about finding a place or home to anchor yourself and your descendants to even if it doesn’t belong to you. It’s about resilience, finding some way, however messy, to deal with catastrophic events that advance and retreat or ebb and flow unpredictably through our lives. What matters is how we adapt.

Welcoming Our 2024 Fall Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Rita Chang-Epigg, Val Wang, and Pallavi Dixit.

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.

rita chang-epigg - september 2024

Rita Chang-Eppig's debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, was a Barnes & Noble Discover, Indie Next, Indies Introduce, and Good Morning America Buzz pick. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Writers Grotto, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

About her project: The Reverse is a speculative novel following two Chinese American siblings as they try to stay alive in a near-future world. Nyx, a nonbinary "oneironaut," is part of a scientific expedition to the Reverse, a dream reality where dangers lurk around every corner. Dawn, Nyx's sister, has been looking for them ever since they disappeared with the expedition team years ago. In her search for Nyx, Dawn makes increasingly dangerous enemies in a society shaken by climate change, poverty, and disease. What is our responsibility to our own happiness in a crumbling world, and what is our responsibility to the people we love?

val wang - october 2024

Val Wang is an author and filmmaker interested in the intersection between the personal and the global. She is the author of the memoir Beijing Bastard as well as the director of the documentary The Flip Side, which won Best Documentary Short at the 2018 DisOrient Asian American Film Festival of Oregon. She lives in Cambridge and is an Associate Professor in the English and Media Studies Department of Bentley University.

About her project: A globe-spanning novel about the friendship between a trio of female circus artists who begin their lives together in a circus school in Beijing, China and go on to travel the world.

pallavi dixit - november 2024

Pallavi Sharma Dixit is a recent winner of the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Pages in Progress competition. Her work has been supported by the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Program, Intermedia Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center and the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lives in Minneapolis with her husband, two children and dog, Tiffin.

About her project: Pallavi will be working on a second novel.

Welcoming Our 2024 Summer Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Peter Lee, Daniel Hoesl, and Nancy Woo.

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. We also thank our partners at PEN America, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Goodside, and The Ruby for their nominations.

Peter Lee - June 2024

Pete Lee is a director and photographer based out of San Francisco. Lee grew up in Taiwan during the golden era of Asian cinema but, due to his strict religious upbringing, secular culture was banished from his house. Instead, Lee spent his childhood watching his preacher father politely exorcise demons.
As a filmmaker, Lee's short film Don't Be a Hero premiered at Sundance in 2018. In 2019, he received support from the Rainin Foundation for his screenplay High Priestess of Souls. As a photographer, Lee’s work was recently seen in Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown, which won the James Beard
cookbook of the year in the restaurant and professional category. Currently, Lee is working on a book project with James Beard winner chef Justin Pichetrungsi of Anajak and developing several features with producers Boots Riley and George Rush.
Around town, Lee is known for his elaborate dumpling parties, his kung-fu movie screenings, and starting Whitney Houston singalongs on the piano.

About his project: Pete will be working on a screenplay titled “Lucky Kentucky,” which is a melancholic comedy about a middle-aged man searching throughout the Midwest for the missing Chinese chef behind his favorite rendition of the General Tso's chicken from his childhood, and the lovers, friends, and homicidal forces he meets along the way.

Daniel hoesl - july 2024

Daniel Hoesl, born 1982, lives in Vienna, Austria. He studied MultiMediaArts at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences. His first narrative feature "Soldier Jane" premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Tiger Award at Rotterdam Film festival, where his second narrative feature "WINWIN" premiered in 2016. His first documentary "Davos" premiered 2020 at Visions du Réel. His third feature film co-directed with his partner & partner-in-crime Julia Niemann "VENI VIDI VICI" premiered 2024 again at Sundance Film Festival. His latest narrative feature "Un gran casino" - about the biggest casino in Europe in Campione d'Italia - is currently in post-production. His narrative films are satires. All his films target the price of money.

About his project: Daniel will be working on a screenplay titled THE SPIRIT OF DAVOS, which is a satire set during the World Economic Forum in the Swiss mountain village of Davos. He will also be conducting research for another project titled CAESARS PALACE, which is a movie about an undead woman who returns to take revenge on the heirs of the family that once took her life.

nancy woo - august 2024

Nancy Lynée Woo is an eco-centric poet based in southern California who harbors a wild love for the natural world. She has released a full-length poetry book entitled I’d Rather Be Lightning from Gasher Press, as well as two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Radar Poetry, Stirring, West Trade Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and others. Nancy has received fellowships from PEN America, California Creative Corps, Artists at Work, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has an MFA from Antioch University.

About her project: Nancy will be working on her second poetry manuscript tentatively titled Field Notes from a Slow Apocalypse. These poems are centered around the topics of environmental destruction and climate change. The speaker of these poems mourns the loss of global ecosystems while appreciating the beauty of plants and animals around her. She struggles with the sobering reality that the stable climate is breaking down rapidly while also maintaining a sense of hope and optimism. There is a tension in these poems between what is outside the average person’s control when it comes to global politics and the agency of every individual to affect change where they’re at.
In addition to traditionally written poems, she is toying with a collection of “field notes” that she is trying to formulate into a digestible fashion for the reader, among other elements like photos, audio files, etc. that might be included in a kind of multi-media collage project.

Welcoming Our 2024 Spring Fellows for Writing Downtown

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, Isobel Harbison, 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.

Isobel harbison - april 2024

Isobel Harbison is an Irish writer and art historian based in London, where she is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths (University of London). Her criticism and essays on art, film and literature have appeared in a range of publications including The Baffler, the London Review of Books, The London Magazine, Metrograph, The White Review, and Tolka. Her writing has previously won grants, awards and fellowships in the US and Europe. Recent essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for non-fiction (2024) and shortlisted for the Hay Festival and Eccles Centre Writing Award (2024). She is currently an Eccles Fellow at the British Library where she is completing her next book.

About her project: She will be researching her next book about the work and cultural legacy of female sign designer, Betty Willis, who created the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign in 1959. Among her other neons, this was her most famous, a sign that is now one of world’s best-known images. The book explores her background and art school training, her technical and artistic skills, the scope of her designs and the many colleagues with whom she collaborated and later influenced. These stories of innovation are set among others of women who came to work beneath her electric landmarks, first the card dealers and croupiers, cleaners, and showgirls, then the writers, artists, and filmmakers. The book celebrates Willis’s signs as art, and lodestars for nocturnal activity – central to a unique culture of night, light, desire, and freedom.

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.

Welcoming our 2023 Fall Fellows for Writing Downtown

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.

Welcoming our 2023 Summer Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Meredith Hambrock, A. Rey Pamatmat, and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.

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.

Meredith Hambrock - July 2023

Meredith Hambrock has worked in writing rooms on over 100 episodes of TV Comedy. She most recently served as Executive Story Editor on the sitcom “Corner Gas Animated” where she wrote for many hilarious Canadians. In 2022, her episode “A Lot to Be Desired” was nominated for a Leo Award. Her debut mystery novel, “Other People’s Secrets”, was published in September by Crooked Lane Books and was called “audacious” and “fabulous” by the New York Times Book Review, was one of The Rapsheet Mags Best Reads of 2022, was a Whodunit Mystery Bookstore Book of the Year Finalist, and was nominated for a Lefty Award in the Best Debut Mystery Category.

About her project: The project I'll be working on is a literary mystery/eco thriller called "Woman Found Floating" about the staff on a yacht crossing the Pacific Ocean and all that unfolds after they rescue a mysterious woman they find floating on a life raft in the middle of nowhere who claims her own sailboat was lost in a fire. As they get to know her, things are not as they appear and soon begin to suspect they were meant to find her.

a. Rey Pamatmat - August 2023

A. Rey Pamatmat’s plays include Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them (Actors Theatre of Louisville), after all the terrible things I do (Milwaukee Rep), House Rules (Ma-Yi), Thunder Above, Deeps Below (Second Generation), A Spare Me (Waterwell), and DEVIANT. His newest play, Safe, Three Queer Plays, follows the seismic changes in Queer America through a gay man of color’s life. Rey also recently contributed to a collaborative libretto for Desert In, which premiered on the Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv. His work has been translated into Spanish and Russian, performed in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Russia, and published by Concord Theatricals, Playscripts, Cambria Press, and Vintage. Rey is the former co-director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and was a PoNY, Hodder, and Princess Grace Fellow.

About his project: Several things frustrated me about the American Theater pre-pandemic, and that frustration was amplified mid-pandemic, and then continued to make it difficult to write new work now that we’re post-(or-whenever-the-eff-we-are-now-)pandemic. One of the biggies, though? TRAUMA PORN. Not the thing in and of itself, but its relationship to our white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist (and beloved) American theater.

There’s a trend toward the production of work that requires BIPOC, women, queer, underprivileged, and otherwise disenfranchised playwrights to plumb the depths of their most personal injuries and put them on display. An audience — still predominantly wealthy, white, and seeking entertainment — watches these plays and delights over traumas so alien to them that they experience more pity than terror. They then depart the theater believing they’ve performed some great act of social justice in the refilling of their empathy gauge. However, all they’ve really done is had a nice, probably expensive, night out. Meanwhile, the joyful plays we’ve written, or plays we’ve written to our community for our community, get passed up for the next tale of woe. Dramatic Action as Intercourse + Catharsis as Orgasm + Self-aggrandizing Sympathy as Afterglow = Trauma Porn in the contemporary American theater! But then, with complete disregard for my annoyance at this exploitative structure, my dad went and died. My incarcerated dad, from whom I’ve been estranged for more than a decade, during a global pandemic, DIED. And now I can’t possibly write about anything else — how would I even begin? So it’s either write nothing at all or write about the depth of personal injury I suffered as his son.

Of course, I’ve written about my dad my entire life. Whether explicitly through absent, misguided, and downright villainous parents or implicitly through themes of thoughtless authority, of the necessity of found families, or of the attempt to connect despite irreconcilable difference, I’ve rarely not written about him. But now I am actually writing about my actual dad, without the safe distance mimesis and metaphor typically provide. What can I do, then, except write a play about my difficult relationships with both my dad and trauma porn?

I am not intent on taking anyone down in this exploration — neither my father nor the American Theater (or, for that matter, my family, exhibitionist playwrights, the empowered’s obsession with the disenfranchised’s pain, or even those sad social media messages about taking mental health breaks that simultaneously seek to avoid attention while seeking attention). Mostly, in the 15-ish pages I’ve already written, I’ve been confused and asking questions: who was my dad? Why couldn’t we get along? Do I pity him his imprisonment even though it was for a crime he DID commit? Why do people want to watch me figure this out? Why can’t I write something else? Do I want to write this and show it to people? Do I want to not want to write this? Who the hell am I if I do want to write it? Who the hell am I if I don’t want to write it, but I do anyway? And why do I turn to narrative to make sense of messy relationships and theatrical trends that I know do not make sense?

sterling holywhitemountain - september 2023

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He holds a BA in English creative writing from the University of Montana and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. He was also a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and more recently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in volumes 1 and 2 of Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers, Montana Quarterly, ESPN.com., The Yellow Medicine Review, and The Atlantic. He's currently at work on a novel. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.

About his project: A novel about blood quantum laws and the way they play out on the ground in Indian Country, between people from the same community.

Welcoming our 2023 Spring Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Esther Tsvayg, Marian Whitaker, and Gregor Langen.

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 our fellowships to life.

Esther Tsvayg - ApriL 2023

Esther is a queer, Russian + Jewish multi-media storyteller born and raised in Brooklyn and based out of Los Angeles. She is a filmmaker, published historian, accredited fact checker, and has served in roles both in guaranteed income and as a research assistant for an acclaimed, best-selling fantasy novelist with a Paramount Pictures deal.

About her project: I will be working on a script about a dysfunctional, working class immigrant family that unravels during the observance of two major events— the oldest daughter marrying into a wealthy, educated family and the graduation of the youngest daughter from a prestigious university.

Marian Whitaker - May 2023

Marian recently graduated UCLA with an MFA in Screenwriting and currently works in production at Jimmy Kimmel Live. She has won grants for past writing projects, placed as a Semi-Finalist in the 2022 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards thriller genre, and currently aims to revise a novel manuscript she first wrote out while living out of a van in Australia.

About her project: I have a complete manuscript for a chick-lit mystery novel similar to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. I have two mentors (authors experienced in the genre) who helped me develop a revision plan and offered to introduce me to agents once I revise the manuscript.

Currently, I live in LA with my partner and three cats. I also possess a vibrant (but distracting) social life. I believe the opportunity to work on my manuscript in a separate space for a couple weeks would be extremely productive.

gregor langen - May 2023

Gregor Langen is a writer from the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota's MFA program, where he was awarded the Winifred Fellowship for Fiction. He lives in Saint Paul with his wife, the SF writer Sophie Wereley.

About his project: While in LV, I will be working furiously to finalize a third draft of my novel, tentatively titled VASELINE. Below is a short tag:

VASELINE is a dark comic novel that follows eleven-year-old Danny von Lawton and her sixty-seven-year-old ‘grandmamom’ over the course of one peewee hockey season. Set in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin, the novel’s central question concerns the shifting relationship between Danny and her grandmamom, and the old woman’s progressively fanatic belief that her Danny is a “conduit to God.” When a gruesome sports injury prompts Grandmamom to confront Danny with the “truth” of her prophetic powers, Danny must find a way to manifest God’s glory on Earth, or leave her grandmamom, her hockey team, and her small-town community to ruin.

Welcoming our 2023 Winter Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Cameron Woods, Aphelandra, and Joseph Lee.

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.

Cameron Woods - January 2023

Cameron Woods is a recent graduate of Stanford University where he majored in African and African American Studies. He has completed a various amount of the pilots, mostly centered around the stories of his family's trials and tribulations throughout the generations. He loves sci-fi and fantasy and hopes to contribute to a new aesthetic of naturalistic fantasy with his future projects. When he's not writing, Cameron loves to perform stand up and write original songs with his friends. 

About his project: Cameron is writing a short film about a couple who can only meet up with each other when they are both dreaming. A fantasy/romance story about what it means to be with someone who might know you better than you know yourself. 

Aphelandra - February 2023

Aphelandra is an illustrator, designer, and publishing professional based in Chicago. In 2021 she made her debut as a children's picture book artist with "Shaped By Her Hands," which garnered numerous accolades. In a starred review, Kirkus called her work "earthy and elemental," and Publishers Weekly noted her "vibrant, subtly textured" artistry. Aphelandra has designed products for a wide array of companies, such as Hallmark Cards, Penguin Random House, and Disney. She enjoys using her creative skills to tell meaningful stories and help people connect with one another.

About her project: I will be working on new pieces for my illustration portfolio and doing some sketching and rewriting for my manuscript "The Dragon Who Ate the Moon," a children's picture book.

Joseph Lee - March 2023

Joseph Lee is a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) on Martha’s Vineyard. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he now lives in Queens, New York. Joseph reports on Indigenous affairs and the environment for Grist and teaches creative writing at Mercy College. Joseph was a 2020 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop. His essays and journalism have been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed News, The Verge, Tin House, Electric Literature, Catapult, High Country News, Outside, and more.

About his project: I will be working on a nonfiction book about Martha's Vineyard, the Wampanoag tribe, and Indigenous identity.

Welcoming our 2022 Fall Fellows for Writing Downtown

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Jean Kyoung Frazier, Kiara Gomez, Adrian L. Jawort, and Jerome A. Parker.

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.

JEAN KYOUNG FRAZIER - OCTOBER 2022

Jean Kyoung Frazier lives in Brooklyn. Pizza Girl was her debut novel. She also writes for television.

About her project: My second novel. It's a stoner tragedy and part of it takes place in Las Vegas.

KIARA GOMEZ - OCTOBER 2022

Kiara Gomez is a recent Harvard College graduate with a degree in Social Anthropology and Government. Kiara has been writing speculative fiction since she can remember and has recently begun screenwriting. When she’s not reading, writing, or watching stories, she can be found admiring multimillion-dollar homes on Zillow or enjoying Southern California’s perennial good weather at the beach.

About her project: I will be drafting a Young Adult fantasy novel, which mythologizes family stories from Mexico and my own experiences growing up in the United States.

ADRIAN L. JAWORT - NOVEMBER 2022

Adrian L. Jawort is a Northern Cheyenne fiction writer and journalist based in Billings, Montana. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and Indian Country Today. She is the author of Moonrise Falling, a horror novel, and the editor of and contributor to Off the Path volumes I and II, a fiction anthology featuring indigenous writers from around the globe. She has a collection of short stories called In the Shadow of Custer and is currently completing her novel based on her experiences of being transgender in a red state.

About her project: I will completing my novel based on my experiences of coming out as an Indigenous transgender woman in a red state. It is a very deep psychological dive on something I've never seen really addressed in the way I am doing.

JEROME A. PARKER - DECEMBER 2022

Jerome A. Parker is a published writer for the stage and screen with a focus on musical theater as a composer, lyricist, and librettist. From New York City, his works champion black and brown heroes as they wrestle through the baggage of their histories. Highlighted works for the stage and screen include BLISS: A SOLDIER'S TALE (Public Theater); LIKE JOHNNY IN THE DARK (Dramatist Guild); KAYA: TASTE OF PARADISE (New York Film Academy); and BLACK QUEEN SCREEN TESTS (The Tank NYC).

Currently, as a collaborative librettist with Experiments in Opera NY, his commissioned pieces in the epic, episodic EVERYTHING FOR DAWN, are now streaming on PBS AllARTS. And the EP recording of STRANGE FELLOWE: LOVE, his collaboration with composers Nick DePinna and Hitomi Oba, featuring Grammy Winner Kristolyn Lloyd, will be available across all music streaming platforms in 2023. As a dramaturg he's developing 2 new musicals: EllaRose Chary and Brandon J. Gwinn's QUEER. PEOPLE. TIME., and CATARACT HOUSE with The Becton International Black Theater and Arts.

An alumnus of Williams College (BA Theatre), The Juilliard School (Production/Costumes), UCLA School of Theater, Film, Television and New Media (MFA Playwriting), the Public Theater’s EWG; and his fellowships include the Dramatist Guild, MacDowell, American Lyric Theater, New York Stage and Film, Freedom Train Productions, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and the Writers Guild of America East.

About his project: Currently he's developing his opera trilogy FREIDA, as librettist and composer. Originally commissioned by Intiman Theater, FREIDA has been developed through fellowships, readings and workshops at New York Stage and Film, MacDowell, Dramatist Guild, National Black Theater, and the Obsidian Theater Festival (recently featured in American Theatre Magazine). FREIDA tells the story of a young girl, Freida, whose father is murdered by a police officer in front of her eyes and the revenge seeking woman she becomes as a result. Taking place between 1989 and 2015, in the fictional, small city of Homestead, CT, FREIDA's lens explores race relations and police militarization in urban areas as well as Black Rage. While in residence with Plympton, Jerome will compose the third and final part, FREIDA: BLACK, solidifying a libretto which plunges our heroine into a spiritual realm with the dead.