Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and multi-dimensional performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on Dakota land in Minneapolis. She employs poetics, the erotic, and experiences re-membered via ancestral dreaming within her writing. She’s written for the stage, including the aerial-poetic-play, There Are Other Worlds and co-wrote the puppet show, Queen with Erik Ehn. She wrote and directed, Sweetness of Wild, an experimental, episodic film project inspired by wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder of performance collective Free Black Dirt with Erin Sharkey. Her writing can be found in several anthologies, including Queer Voices, How I Resist and Pleasure Activism. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award and was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist. She is currently writing her second young adult novel, Black Circus.

Fellowship Statement

For my fellowship, I’ll center on healing and balance as an artist. I’ll get professional career counseling, as well as take more walks, rest and reflect. I will spend intentional time researching Black and queer ancestors of my artistic lineage. I’ll spend time connecting with my artistic mentors, including Alexis DeVeaux and Sharon Bridgeforth. I’ll be writing, researching and editing new books including a young adult book, Black Circus, set in the 90s about a young, Black woman studying aerial acrobatic arts with a mysterious and mystical former circus performer. I’ll work on a collection of poetry, pum pum, as well as an experimental interdisciplinary work called Erotics of Abolition.

Photo by Ngowo Nasah

Susanna Horng is a Taiwanese-American writer, educator, mother, and activist. Her work has been supported by a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has been published in Bennington Review, Minerva Rising, and Global City Review. She is a teaching artist for Girls Write Now and a Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University. She lives with her family in New York City.

Fellowship Statement

I write about the silence of being a woman from a patriarchal culture, the silence of being a woman of color navigating white spaces, the silence of being a mother and caretaker on the second shift.

I care about word play, multilingualism, and language. How multiple or misunderstood meanings of the same word(s) trigger deeper emotional truths. What gets voiced. What gets sacrificed. The costs of trying and failing to communicate.

I am finishing a collection of linked stories that examines the success and failures of the American Dream, the sorrows of living in one of the largest Chinese diasporas, and the loneliness of being the perpetual outsider. I am also working on a novel about privilege, class, and equity.

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned an MFA from Hamline University. She is the author of Soft: A Memoir and is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, and SASE/Jerome Grant. She was a Loft Mentor Series winner in Creative Nonfiction, a Jones’ Playwright Commission Award Winner, and was selected for the Givens Black Writers Collaborative. Her poems and essays appear in New Limestone Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, the minnesota review, Rain Taxi’s-Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Poems in the Wake of Racial Justice, and the anthology, How Dare We! Write, among others. She co-curates the Queer Voices Reading Series with writer and performer Lisa Marie Brimmer in collaboration with Quatrefoil Library and Hennepin County Library.

Fellowship Statement

There were glimmers of hope at the start of the 20th century for my Afro-Cubans ancestors who worked in the cigar factories in Hillsborough County, Florida and lived in planned communities designed to stabilize the lives of workers who created enormous wealth for the factory owners. There was a lot to negotiate. They were black men and women in the south experiencing the horrors of that time, and they were sometimes welcomed and sometimes unwelcomed members of the Cuban community. My fellowship goal is to complete my work in progress, Here Before, a hybrid of prose and poetry. I am a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to Barbados and Cuba, and the southern states of Georgia and North Carolina. I want to resurrect my dead and have them tell a truth beyond prolonged disenfranchisement, especially as it relates to their spiritual lives.

Photo by Anna Min, Min Enterprises Photography, LLC

Carson Faust is a queer writer, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. His writing has received support from the Tin House Writers’ Workshops as well as the Minnesota State Arts Board, and has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Waxwing, AnomalyJournal, Passages North, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member for 826 MSP—a nonprofit organization that provides literacy- and creative writing-based programming for underserved K-12 students in the Twin Cities area. He is represented by Annie Hwang of Ayesha Pande Literary.

Fellowship Statement

My novel-in-progress—A Bible Or A Knife—utilizes the genre of horror to grapple with the ways in which Indigenous and queer identities are represented, misrepresented, or erased within the canon. Canonically, queer folks and people of color are often confined to antagonistic or secondary roles; Native American stories and histories are used as tools and backdrops within horror narratives. My work aims to turn these banalities on their heads: When Indigenous people maintain their hold on and connection to their homeland, how might the lingering shadow of colonialism persist? What does it look like when land is haunted by the colonizers who failed to remove Native American communities?

Photo by Laura Rae Photography

Ama Codjoe (she/her) is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize and Bluest Nude forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in Fall 2022. Her work has been awarded support from Cave Canem, Jerome, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations, as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Crosstown Arts, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell. Among other honors, Codjoe is the recipient of a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a 2020 BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.

Fellowship Statement

I want to continue to learn about the world and about myself through the practice of poetry in the hopes of making true for myself and others Adrienne Rich’s lines from Dreamwood: “that poetry/ isn’t revolution but a way of knowing/ why it must come.” I want to be led into poems by color, music, serendipity, research and travel. Currently, I am revising and shaping my first full-length collection Bluest Nude.

Photo by Jamie Harmon

Lexie Bean (they/he) is a queer and trans multimedia artist whose work revolves around themes of bodies, homes, cyclical violence, and LGBTQIA+ identities. They're a member of the RAINN National Leadership Council and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Written On The Body, centering fellow trans survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, and served as a keynote speaker for MaleSurvivor and universities around the United States. Their experimental and animated short films, Full, Trans Boy Remember, and The Ship We Built, which later became an #OwnVoices, Kirkus Starred novel with Penguin Random House and a feature-length film script, have played in festivals globally. Their latest writing, A Scavenger Hunt For People Loneliest In Their Own Homes, was commissioned by Price Hill Will. Their work has been featured in Teen Vogue, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Feminist Wire, Ms. Magazine, Them, Logo’s New Now Next, Bust Magazine, Autostraddle, and more. www.lexiebean.com

Fellowship Statement

I’m interested in creating for those who blame themselves for falling into the same mistakes again and again; people who can't hold their own bodies. I want to create for those struggling with shame, developing new vocabularies, and forming families; people who are afraid of change. Queer folks surviving the Midwest, where I'm from. I’m interested in developing narratives where there is danger in forgetting, and remind us all that there is resilience in imagination.

I am currently working on several personal projects relating to these themes: a television pilot, Flyovers; my first Young Adult novel, All My Good Memories Of That House Were With You; my first auto-fiction novel for adults, Across From You; continued building and collaboration for the screenplay version of my debut novel, The Ship We Built; as well as collaborative pieces, like What Will I Become?, through documentary and anthology curation.

Photo by Llewellyn Nuñez

Catina Bacote grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Kweli, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, The Common, Prairie Schooner, December Magazine, Southern California Review, and in the anthology, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Her work has been supported by residencies at Hedgebrook, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony, Willapa Bay AiR, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony where she received the Ann Cox Chambers Long-form Journalism Fellowship, and the Ragdale Foundation where she received the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship. Bacote holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was admitted as a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow and subsequently served as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in how the writer’s voice acts as an ethical pointer in a world where poverty and excessive wealth, political repression, gun violence, racial segregation, and mass incarceration persist. My nonfiction writing depends on collecting personal testimony and attempts to uncover intimate stories that have not been told or retell those distorted by the realms of politics or entertainment. However, some tales feel dangerous to share because even the people they touch have kept silent. But as an artist, I aspire to step into uncharted territory and gently bring others along with me. I engage in this work not as a distant observer or objective researcher but as a Black woman whose life has been shaped by racial and economic injustice. Presently, I am working on my first book-in-progress, Eastern Circle, which chronicles the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on my family and community.

Taja Will is a queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee, performer, choreographer, and Healing Justice practitioner based in the Twin Cities, the occupied land of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. Will integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance that explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through ritual, archetypes and everyday magic.

Will has been presented in Walker Art Center Choreographer’s Evening, Red Eye Theater, Right Here Showcase and the Candy Box Dance Festival and is the recipient of a 2018 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by the Cowles Center and funded by The McKnight Foundation. Will recently received support from the National Association of Latinx Arts & Culture, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. As a performer Will has collaborated with Sara Shelton Mann, Rosy Simas, Keith Hennessy, Pramila Vasudevan, Deborah Jinza Thayer, Timmy Rehborg, Body Cartography Project and Miguel Gutierrez among others.

Fellowship Statement

My work is conceptual, state-based, grounded in personal practice, and always in relationship to socio-cultural realities of the moment. In that, my areas of attention for the fellowship duration will include personal movement practice, mentorship, and writing/artist advocacy. For me, a weekly, uninterrupted personal movement practice is a foundation for my creativity, physical range, and the creation of new work. Mentorship is my primary affinity. I intend to continue my mentorship with Sara Shelton Mann, as she is willing and able, and start a mentorship with a voice-based artist and a contemporary performance artist who engages with writing. Another area of focus I’m invested in is writing, creative and pragmatic. I’m interested in developing tools for artists to encourage further equity in relationship with presenters and institutional partners, such as a values rider.

Photo by Nanne Sorvold

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a dance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Albany, NY, Lloyd graduated from The College at Brockport where he performed works by Maura Keefe and Alexandra Beller. He has collaborated with and performed for Karl Rogers, Netta Yerushalmy, Tammy Carrasco, Monica Bill Barnes, Catherine Galasso, Laura Peterson, Ambika Raina and David Dorfman Dance. His teaching practice has brought him to Rutgers University and Mark Morris Dance Center, and his work has been produced by New York Live Arts, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, The Center for Performance Research and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. He was selected as a 2019 Center for Performance Research Artist in Resident and is a recipient of the 2019-21 Fresh Tracks Performance and Residency Program at New York Live Arts. For more please head to jordandlloyd.com

Fellowship Statement

My approach to making is visual and imaginative, using movement as a tool to manipulate time and space and to stretch the edges of the collective experience. I work intuitively when generating material and focus on formal elements such as shape, color and texture to arrive at a place of cohesion. My work is home to considerations of place and moments in the world, teetering along lines of fantasy and vast, radical imagination. By rooting my work in compositional specificity and performative intention, I aim to muddle interpretation and complicate association, keeping the viewing experience active and participatory. Movement, to me, can act as a portal into memory, ancestry and a deeper level of feeling that widens the possibilities of what a moment represents. In many ways, my work seeks to sustain attention, evoke questions, and stimulate opinions while bringing communities together to share a specific moment in time.

Photo by Aundre Larrow

LeilAwa [Leila Awadallah] is a Palestinian, Arab-American dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and cultural activist based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and Beirut, Lebanon. She holds a BFA in Dance and minor in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota. LeilAwa founded the project: Body Watani (body-as-homeland) and is developing an offering of Arab Rooted Contemporary dance, both of which engage with dance forms, rhythms and rituals of SWANA, ancestral memories, and embodied reflections on settler-colonial occupation and indigenous resistance.

LeilAwa’s work and research has been supported by Jerome Foundation, Springboard for the Arts, Arab American National Museum, Mizna, Lebanese National Theatre, Amalgam, Camargo Foundation, Cedar Tree Project, Walker, Rhythmically Speaking, Threads Dance Co. and SAGE. Leila danced with Ananya Dance Theatre, performing locally, nationally, and internationally in Ethiopia, Palestine and India; is a founding member of Kelvin Wailey, 3wadallahs and Solidarity Rising; and a collaborator with Theatre of the Women of the Camp.

Fellowship Statement

LeilAwa (lay-luh-wuh) merges my gifted name, لیلى , with my family lineage, عوض اللھ , to embody a self that is both rooted in histories and becoming into futures. I dive deep into intersections of arts and activism, beginning with body and breathing outwards to examine the ways dance engages with human rights, invites healing, invokes critical thinking, and physicalizes practices of decolonizing our bodies / lands through re-membering and re-imagining. This emerging project: Body Watani is a pathway, a container with soft edges, space for artists / peoples to reflect on this notion of body as a site of living homeland. Through this fellowship, I will take steps to establish Body Watani as a project-based dance company split between Minneapolis and Beirut, building community, creating workshops, growing collaborations, and initiating the company’s first full piece, Terraena: hakawati of the sea. As well as prioritizing Arab, SWANA, and Mediterranean dance / cultural / political studies. SWANA [South West Asia and North Africa] is a decolonial term used when referring to the ‘Middle East’ or ‘Arab world’ (which is not all Arab) to locate geographically rather than ethnically.

Photo by Trista Marie Photo