We’re thrilled to announce our next Writing Downtown fellows, Sarah Wang, Jennifer Parr, and Leah Johnson, who joins us via our partnership with Catapult.
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 near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.
Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Sarah Wang - march 2019
Sarah Wang is a writer from Los Angeles who currently splits her time between New York and the West Coast. She won a Nelson Algren runner-up prize for fiction in 2016 and has performed at and received commissions from the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement in Geneva, Switzerland, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in France, the New Museum, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. She has written for BOMB, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Catapult, Conjunctions, Stonecutter Journal, Story Magazine, The Third Rail, Ugly Duckling Presse, semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter, Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder, The Shanghai Literary Review, Black Clock, Performa Magazine, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, and The Last Newspaper at the New Museum, among other publications. See more of her writing at wangsarah.com
Leah Johnson - April 2019
Leah Johnson is a writer, educator and hopeless Midwesterner currently moonlighting as a New Yorker. She's the Social Media Editor at Electric Lit and a Contributing Editor at Catapult. Leah received her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2018 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work—which can be found at Bustle, Electric Lit, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Establishment and elsewhere—is centered on the miracle and magic of black womanhood. Her debut YA novel is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2020.
About her project:
Set amidst a Flint-like water crisis in Lincoln, Indiana, WHO THE EARTH IS FOR is a YA novel that follows 17-year-old Free Jackson as she navigates her senior year in a town that the world seems to have forgotten and a family that can’t survive without her. Free’s dream of finally “escaping” her hometown and going to college are derailed when she discovers that her lifelong best friend is pregnant and needs help taking care of the baby. With the help of a new boy with a bright smile that hides secrets of his own, Free must ultimately answer the question: Is there a way to take care of the people and the place that raised you when the only thing you want to do is leave them?
Jennifer Parr - May 2019
I graduated with honors with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Tampa in 2006. As a former elementary school teacher, I have a passion and gift for working with children. I am currently working on a middle grade fantasy novel called THE ROYAL GAMES. I also am a contributing author of Amazon bestseller “365 Days of Angel Prayers” and founder of Asheville Writing Collective, a local writing community in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.
I will be working on THE ROYAL GAMES, a middle grade fantasy novel, currently at approximately 14,000 words and estimated to be 45,000 upon completion.
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 www.writingdowntown.com