We’re thrilled to announce the next three fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Selena Anderson and Juliana Brown Eyes.
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.
This year’s apartment will be 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 the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain - June 2021
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.
Selena Anderson - July 2021
Selena Anderson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Oxford American, The Baffler, Bomb, Georgia Review, and Fence. She has received fellowships from the Kimbilio Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Anderson is an assistant professor at San José State University, where she also directs a reading series. She is working on a novel.
About her project: I'll be spending my time in residence to revise a few chapters of a novel and write a new story. The novel Quinella is the tale of a newlywed who as a means of self-preservation, makes a life-sized doll of herself, complete with all her hopes and obsessions. But then she loses the doll. Various people in the town find the doll and reclaim her in ways by inventing new stories to temper the feelings of doom and uncertainty they begin to notice when she’s around. The story is about a slave who casts a spell on her master which day by day slowly turns him to sugar.
Juliana Brown Eyes - August 2021
Juliana Brown Eyes is an Indigenous/Polynesian writer, director, and artist from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Oglala Sioux Tribe, the only tribe to never surrender to the US government.
Juliana has been featured in many publications including the UK’s Marie Claire: Native American Women Fighting to Preserve Their Culture, Huffington Post, BBC, Radio New Zealand and Glamour Magazine for her contributions through film and music in social justice movements like the Standing Rock movement.
For the past few years she’s worked on a variety of film and directing projects. Most recently living in Brazil, writing and directing alongside Katia Lund, Oscar-winning co-director of City of God. Together they created a 6 part docu-series (currently in post-production) on the oil industry and the Trump administration’s extraction of natural resources from Indigenous lands that are supposed to be protected by tribal treaties with the US government.
Capturing ancestral knowledge through an Indigenous lens, Juliana strives to put Indigenous stories at the forefront of pop culture and box office cinemas. Utilizing her innate disposition for community activism and cultural revitalization, Juliana has captured stories from Indigenous cultures around the world traveling the Amazon, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America.
About her project: I will be working on a 6 part episodic series about an Indigenous female vigilante confronting the issues of sex-trafficking and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) tracking.