We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Demian DinéYazhi ́, Zin E. Rocklyn, and Lindsey Toya-Tosa.
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.
Demian DineYazhi - January 2022
Demian DinéYazhi ́ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábaahá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the overaccumulative and exploitative nature of hetero cis gender supremacist normativity. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, colonial manipulation, sexual & gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land it wrongfully occupies and refuses to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail. @heterogeneoushomosexual
About their project: I will be working on developing new writing for my next book project, as well as working and presenting work in support of my latest publication, WE LEFT THEM NOTHING. I will be utilizing video to create work as an extension of WE LEFT THEM NOTHING, and read from the book as well.
I'm currently beginning to think about content and themes for my next book, so utilizing the space will allow me the space to think through and begin dreaming of what this new work will look like.
Zin E. Rocklyn - February 2022
Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story "Summer Skin" in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax's Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story "Night Sun" and flash fiction "teatime" was published on Tor.com. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate. You can find them on Twitter @intelligentwat.
About their project: I will be working on my Dark Fantasy novel which is a riff on Cinderella if she were a Black Queer mercenary who was betrayed by her father.
Lindsey Toya-tosa - March 2022
I'm Lindsey Toya-Tosa from the Pueblo of Jemez. I graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with my bachelor of arts degree in creative writing in 2019. Currently I am an MFA student at IAIA where I'm working on my thesis. I also like to write fiction and poetry. When I'm not writing I love spending time with my family as well as gardening, sewing, and helping my mom with her small business.
About her project: I am in the last year of receiving my MFA in creative writing with an emphasis on creative nonfiction so I will be working on my thesis. Which is a requirement for graduation but it will also be a completed manuscript that I can publish if I choose to do so. I'll be working on a series of essays for my thesis.