We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Lindsey Webb, Jenn Alann Trahan, and guests Makiko Hirata and Leslie Oh.
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.
LINDSEY WEBB - DECember 2024
Lindsey Webb is the author of 'Plat' (Archway Editions, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and two chapbooks: 'House' and 'Perfumer's Organ'. Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Graduate Research Fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books.
About her project: Lindsey will be working on a book of essays entitled 'Saccades,' about land art and land use in the American West.
JENN ALANN TRAHAN - JANUARY 2025
Jenn Alandy Trahan was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in Fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Jenn's writing has been supported by the Carlisle Family Scholarship at the Community of Writers, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, a Writing Downtown Fellowship in Las Vegas, Nevada, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and a La Baldi Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She is also grateful to Blue Mesa Review, Harper's, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories for featuring her work. Jenn is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she has taught undergraduate courses in fiction, nonfiction, Filipinx fiction, creative expression, and service-learning through creative writing; she's also taught Writer's Studio workshops on writing about class, race, and sports.
About her project: Jenn will be finishing a collection of short stories and starting a new book.
Makiko hirata - january 2025
An international pianist with ten released albums, Makiko Hirata is “Dr. Pianist,” on a mission to promote the power of music to heal and unite us. She collaborates with neuroscientists to quantify the benefit of music and promote it as an overlooked resource to enhance our individual and social well-being through speaking engagements, workshop and writing. She has taught at New York University, Colburn Conservatory of Music, Rice University, and Lone Star College, and is an instructor for Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education and a staff pianist at the Colburn Conservatory of Music. She is a US-Japan Leadership Program fellow, and a Shigeru Kawai Artist. More on Makiko at: musicalmakiko.com/en
About her project: Dr. Hirata will be working on a research memoir titled Mermaid’s Soul: Reclaiming My Voice as an Asian Pianist. The memoir uses her story as a young Japanese pianist to share her insights and research findings.
Leslie oh - february 2025
Leslie Hsu Oh is an outdoor writer with a degree in biology, ethnobotany, MFA in creative nonfiction and public health from Harvard. Her award-winning writing and photography appear in Adventure Journal (NATJA gold), Alaska (Writer’s Digest award), Alpinist (gold medal in Outdoor and Adventure Photography), Backpacker (silver), Conde Nast Traveler, First Alaskans (1st in Environmental Reporting with Alaska Press Club), Fourth Genre (Solas Awards), National Geographic (silver), Outside (gold and silver), Parents Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Saveur (won Lowell Thomas), Smithsonian (silver), Sierra (gold), Travel + Leisure (two golds), Washington Post (silver), Vogue (gold).
About her project: Fireweed: A Memoir is a story about making sense of this world when you lose everything that made sense. It’s about finding a place or home to anchor yourself and your descendants to even if it doesn’t belong to you. It’s about resilience, finding some way, however messy, to deal with catastrophic events that advance and retreat or ebb and flow unpredictably through our lives. What matters is how we adapt.