We’re welcoming four new Writing Downtown fellows, Melissa Gira Grant, Sheree Winslow, José Olivarez, and Emma Best, to Las Vegas.
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. Fellows live in a fully furnished apartment near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.
Special thanks again to the Woodside community, Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Melissa Gira Grant, August 2018
Melissa Gira Grant is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso) and a senior staff reporter at The Appeal. She has been a contributing writer for the Village Voice and Pacific Standard, and long before that, at Gawker Media's Valleywag. Her reporting on sexuality, gender, and technology has appeared in The Guardian, BuzzFeed, VICE, and The Nation, and her culture writing has been published in Bookforum, Dissent, Rhizome, the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books. Her writing has also been collected in Best Sex Writing (Cleis Press), The Feminist Utopia Project (Feminist Press), and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo (Verso).
About her project: Melissa will be working on a book about early 21st century technologies of desire.
Sheree Winslow, September 2018
When the medicine man of her Northern Cheyenne tribe met Sheree, he named her Many Trails Many Roads Woman. She’s moved more times than she cares to admit and wandered through forty-nine states and many countries. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Beecher’s (2018 non-fiction contest runner-up), Past Ten, and Wanderlust Journal. She’s reported for the Orange County Register and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and served as an expertise columnist for Savvy Auntie. Sheree received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A native of Montana, she now lives in Southern California where she’s finishing a memoir about her relationship with her body and recovery from food addiction while advising a tech start up.
About her project: Feeding Myself, a memoir about my relationship with my body and recovery from food addiction.
Emma Best, November 2018
Emma Best is a journalist known for her work with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Her work has landed her at the top of the FBI's list of "vexsome" requesters and resulted in her being investigated by the Bureau for filing too many FOIA requests. She is best known for her role in helping MuckRock push CIA to put their declassified database online in a timely manner.
About her project: "I'm Afraid To Say These Things," a biography of Henry Kissinger using quotes and excerpts from his conversations and papers, as declassified and released through FOIA etc.
José Olivarez, December 2018
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, the co-author of the book of poems Home Court, and the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, & the Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in the BreakBeat Poets, the Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, & Hyperallergic, among other places. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, will be released in September 2018 from Haymarket Books. He lives in Chicago.
About his project: I will be working on editing two manuscripts. One is the BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4, which will compile the work of 70 Latinx poets and one is a critical analysis of Latinx poetry. I will also be working on drafting and editing poems for my second collection of poems.
Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown @ plympton.com.
To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com