2026 Fellows
Award-winning author Suzette D. Harrison grew up in a home where reading was required, not requested.
Mariam I. Williams is a writer, dancer, and cultural curator who writes to find answers, dances to find joy, and curates to deepen understanding.
LaVelle is a native Saint Louisan who has been active in the City’s Metropolitan theater community since 1982.
Tyler Stephens is a part-time MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Chicago State University and a graduate of Spelman College.
The son of Cape Verdean immigrants, Lee Santos Silva (he/him) was raised in Brockton, MA, which is home to one of the largest Cape Verdean communities outside of Cape Verde.
Nia Sampson is a writer from Houston, Texas who is currently pursuing her PhD in English and American Literature at WashU St. Louis.
Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms who is excited to be working on her first novel.
My name is Frances Ogamba, an essayist, editor, and a PhD student at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Kendra Y. Mims won her first writing award in third grade for her short story, “The Big Splatter.”
D. Lenáe Littlefield is a writer and editor living on the cusp of Memphis and Mississippi.
A proud North Carolina native and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Sidney Logan Echevarria uses all of her free time (which isn’t nearly enough) to work on her writing and to support her writing community.
Sharon Browning, born and raised in St. Louis, MO, never imagined living in Tucson, AZ, where a river flows underground, or people wait for the monsoon to bring rainfall, or she would have to lose a staredown with a javelina to avoid it from ramming her car.
H.B. Asari is a Niger Deltan prose and poetry writer. Her work explores current and possible future climate realities, complicated familial bonds and the nuances of queer coming-of-age.
Donnetrice C. Allison, Ph. D currently serves as Professor of both Communication Studies and Africana Studies at Stockton University in Galloway, NJ.
Adesuwa Agbonile is a Nigerian-American writer and host of the Audible podcast Backlash: The Myth of Political Progress.
PK Damilare Abiodun is a Nigerian writer. He recently earned an MFA from Brown University, where he was awarded the Feldman Prize in fiction.
M Shelly Conner is an Associate Professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas where she co-directs the MFA Program for Writers.
2026 Returning Fellows
George Kevin Jordan is a writer and artist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of two novels, That Moment When (2006) and Hopeless (2007), and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University.
Kivel Carson is a storyteller, daydreamer, and organizer whose fiction is concerned with Black life, labor, and empire.
Mary unearths characters’ footsteps and voices to bring collective fulfillment to as many ancestors and contemporaries as her daily 4 a.m. rising allows.
Mary McLaughlin Slechta’s Mulberry Street Stories (Four Way Books) was the 2021 winner of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, a Legacy Award finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation and recipient of the Central New York Book Award.