We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Mylan Gray, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Adrian De Leon, and Sasha Issenberg.
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 the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Mylan gray - August 2021
Mylan Gray is a recent graduate of Stanford University where he studied Playwriting and Black Studies. There, he received the Kennel Jackson Jr. Departmental Award for his Honors thesis play, Buried in Blood: an afro-surrealist conjuring, healing ancestral wounds. He is also a new member of the Tank Theatre’s LIT Council, a playwriting group for Men of Color. In addition to being a playwright he is a screenwriter and short film director.
With a deep reverence for Brazil, and a penchant for spiritual journeying, he draws on the fantastical, magical, and divine to speak healing words of love for 21st century woes. When he is not writing, reading, or watching films, he is in the woods soaking up the songs of birds and listening to the worlds oldest keeper of stories: the trees.
About his project: SPLIX is a dystopian, animated series where a group of POC street teens band together in the outskirts of a private city to defeat corrupt tech magnates waging war on the street organizations in order to sell surveillance equipment and increase militarized policing.
HERITAGE is a short story where a promising young cadet, disenfranchised with her colonial spaceship's journey to conquer the solar system, rebels after her best friend is imprisoned for making musical instruments on a ship where creation is forbidden.
Sarah thankam Mathews - October 2021
Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She has been awarded scholarships from the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Asian American Writers Workshop, the Millay Colony, and the Napa Valley Writers Workshop. Her writing has been published in AGNI, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Short Stories 2020. Her novel ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT is forthcoming from Viking in August 2022.
About her project: Sarah will be working on a project set mostly in Oman, about migration and global capitalism, girlhood and becoming.
Adrian de leon - november 2021
Adrian De Leon is a historian, poet, and multimedia educator from Manila by way of Scarborough, Ontario. He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he teaches Asian American Studies. Adrian is the co-editor of FEEL WAYS: A Scarborough Anthology (March 2021), and the author of two poetry collections: Rouge (2018) and barangay: an offshore poem (October 2021). His writing can be found in Catapult, Joyland, The Puritan, and The Margins (Asian American Writers' Workshop). Adrian is the co-host and co-writer of the PBS miniseries, A People's History of Asian America (2021).
About his project: I will be working on my first creative nonfiction book, RADIANT: Love Letters from a City on the Brink. This is a collection of epistolary essays written from the diverse and tumultuous town of Scarborough, Ontario (Canada), within the blast radius of the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, and built atop radiation hazards such as a major power line throughway and nuclear waste dumps. RADIANT imagines what it means to love intimately and lead full lives while writing from a place of ruins and premature death.
Sasha issenberg - December 2021
Sasha Issenberg is the author of four books, most recently The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage, which The New York Times designated an Editors' Choice selection and O: The Oprah Magazine called ""part Grisham-esque legal thriller, part Sorkin-esque political drama, and part Maddow-esque historical yarn."" His earlier books cover topics from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the science of political campaigns. He is the Washington correspondent for Monocle and teaches in the political science department at UCLA.
About his project: narrative history of the largest election-crime dragnet in American history, which took place in Terre Haute, Indiana, just over a century ago.