Jason Coyle (he/him) and Laska Jimsen (she/her) work across nonfiction forms from video documentary to 16mm filmmaking. Their individual and collaborative work has screened at festivals and venues including Ann Arbor, Athens, Big Muddy, IC Docs, Los Angeles Filmforum, Cellular Cinema, and Walker Art Center. Laska and Jason are individual recipients of Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants and a Jerome Foundation Minnesota Film & Video Grant. Laska is Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College; Jason is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

Fellowship Statement

Our experimental nonfiction film and video work foregrounds acts of observation in sustained investigations of human-animal relationships, systems of management and classification, and representations of the everyday. Our ongoing series Almanac is a collection of formal studies of light, motion, and time, exploring sensory dimensions of seasonal states through singular moments in afternoons across the year. Research is integral to how we conceive of and create longer-form documentaries. We are currently developing new projects that draw on the history of automation and pose questions about contemporary labor and workplace transformations.

Photo (Jason Coyle and Laska Jimsen’s Deer of North America 2017) courtesy the artists.

Shirley Bruno (she/her) holds Masters from London Film School and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains where she was an artist fellow. Shirley's shorts have received awards at major festivals including the Off-Limits Prize in Competition for her experimental short AN EXCAVATION OF US at Annecy International Animated Film Festival (2018) and the Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention (2018). Her docufiction TEZEN was awarded prizes from the National Greek Film Centre (2017) and the StudioPrix Collector (2016) initiated by art collectors Isabelle and John-Conrad Lemaître. She has received funding and support for her work from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, La Cité International, and LIM—Less is More part of Le Groupe Ouest.

Fellowship Statement

Shirley’s films draw from her heritage preserving and radicalizing her ancestral traditions and mythology. She creates modern myths that expose the slippery spaces between the material and metaphysical world, documentary and fiction, between collective memory and history. She explores the everyday, the Sacred, and the intimate violence in the things left unsaid that mark us generation after generation. Her work often takes its point of departure from neglected histories as well as from rumors, dreams, superstitious beliefs, and memories both real and imagined. Currently, Shirley is developing her first feature film, an intimate meditation on women, land, and family legacy.

Photo by Léa Girardin.

Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Republic, the Southampton Review, Pariahs (an anthology, SFA Press, 2016), Blunderbuss Magazine, the Offing, Brooklyn Rail, Joyland Magazine, the Scholar and Feminist Online, the Rumpus, and has received honorable mention from Glimmer Train Press. He was a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction, and a resident in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017–2018 Workspace program. He is also an associate editor at Apogee Journal. Alejandro holds a master's degree in Public Health from the University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to his writing career, he managed cancer-screening studies, designed HIV/AIDS health worker curriculum, and taught public health advocacy.

alejandrovarela.org

Fellowship Statement

I write about the complexities of class-jumping. I see strength within community, and solidarity across communities, as health intervention. I draw from public health research on stress and inequity to craft tales that paint a way forward. My hope is for readers to finish my stories and think, “Reparations for the descendants of slaves, of course!” Or “A minimum wage of $30 per hour (pegged to inflation), duh!” But I also want my writing to make people ask themselves: “How do Ben Affleck and George Clooney each have Oscars while Alfre Woodard has only been nominated once... 35 years ago?”



I’m currently finishing a collection of short stories, and I'm working on a novel about a man who returns home to care for his parents. Several of his high school friends also struggle to survive. He traces the roots of their poor health to the isolation of their formative years.

Photo by Charly Debrosse © LMCC.

Preeti Kaur Rajpal (she/her) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She first began writing as a student of June Jordan in her “Poetry for the People” program. Preeti’s work can be found in The Sikh Review, qarrtsiluni, Memoir Journal’s I Speak From My Palms Anthology, American Public Media’s On Being Blog, Spook Mag, Jaggery Lit, Blueshift Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Popula, Lantern Review, and others. She is a recent Loft Literary Mentor Series Poetry Fellow, Voices of Our Nations Arts Fellow, Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator Fellow, and Writing By Writers Fellow.

Fellowship Statement

I am working on my first collection of poems, tentatively titled O! How We Escaped! My poems explore issues of colonialism, post-colonialism, immigrant status in the US, patriarchy, post-9/11 Islamophobia specific to the effects on Sikhs in the US, human rights issues in India, India’s Partition, my family’s journey as refugees during that time, and my understanding of Sikh philosophy.

Photo by Anna Min.

Patricia Park (she/her) is the author of the acclaimed novel Re Jane, a modern-day reimagining of Brontë’s Jane Eyre set in Queens. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, The Center for Fiction, American Association of University Women, and others. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Salon, and others. She is at work on a second novel which explores the Korean community in Argentina during the Dirty War. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at American University. A native of Queens, she lives in Brooklyn.

Fellowship Statement

I write about minorities within minorities. I was born here but have family from Korea and Argentina. When I was growing up, mainstream America always lumped me into the “Asian” category. But ironically enough, within the Korean community in Queens, I didn’t always feel that I belonged. In my fiction, I challenge our assumptions of the “monolithic minority.” I give voice to anyone who has felt that same loneliness; to anyone who has similarly occupied a culturally confused space.



My first novel, Re Jane, is the story of a mixed-race Korean American orphan from Queens that uses Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as a loose template to raise questions of identity and “homeland.” My second novel-in-progress, El Chino: A Novel in Four Movements, is about a boy named Juan Kim who falls in love with jazz, and the music becomes his freedom of expression during the backdrop of the Argentine Dirty War.

Born in Wonju, Republic of Korea and adopted to Oklahoma, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (she/her) earned a MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2007), Interrogation Room (White Pine Press 2018), and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Bielefeld 2019, German-English editions). A recipient of grants from Intermedia Arts, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Minnesota State Arts Board among others, she is associate professor of creative writing and directs Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College. She lives in Saint Paul.

Fellowship Statement

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is a transnational poet and scholar whose work confronts militarism and racial-gendered-class violence dividing kinships, selves, and imagination. Inspired by the Korean diaspora to which she belongs, she aspires to create alternative ways of feeling, knowing, and remembering to resist over sixty years of unending Korean War and its legacies. Her work has appeared previously in Agni, Blackbird, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Jubilat, Korean Literature Now, Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, and elsewhere. Currently, Kwon Dobbs is developing a mixed-genre, multilingual book manuscript about white settler colonialisms and camptown kitsch in the digital age.

Photo by Thaiphy Phan-Quang.

Su Hwang is a poet, activist, and the author of Bodega with Milkweed Editions, which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York, then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in Literature, she teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with poet Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

My creative practice is constantly evolving to keep pace with current events, but I also strive to acknowledge and bring to light the fraught, complex nature of our collective histories. Language is political, now more than ever––and I believe the act of writing poetry is a concrete form of resistance. My debut poetry collection BODEGA is forthcoming and I will start my second collection ROOST in earnest at Hedgebrook this summer—exploring madness, mass incarceration, and metaphors of containment. I will continue working with incarcerated writers and co-direct Poetry Asylum with poet/activist Sun Yung Shin. Our goal is to highlight and dismantle stereotypes as well as underscore concepts of invisibility in the visible, forced displacement, and transference of violence and discrimination. I aim to produce fearless work that advances my social justice goals through community building, collaboration, activism, advocacy, and open dialogue.

Photo by Jeffrey Forston Photography.

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the winner of Bomb Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. Helal has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Fellowship Statement

My first full-length collection, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), is the launch pad for my next work: intimacy v. isolation, exploring the impact of migration, trauma, and technology on Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development.



I believe in my work's potential to disrupt old ideas and catalyze conversations that create solutions. Just as “poem to be read from right to left” created a robust discussion around colonial structures in the English language, my genre-defying narrative points directly to the inherent systemic abuse in the U.S. immigration system.



This fellowship will support me as creator and teacher. Emerging means forging a path from the margins into the center, where productive conversations around craft and genre intersect with necessary discussions around race, identity, nation-making, and immigration policy, while we continue to make room for new thought; solutions.

t’ai freedom ford (she/her) is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over, is available from Red Hen Press. Her second poetry collection, & more black, is forthcoming Spring 2019 from Augury Books. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Fellowship Statement

My writing grapples with all things related to my existence/non-existence in these United States. This means I'm obsessed with issues around (so-called) race (whiteness/ Blackness/otherness/mixedness), gender and sexuality (gender queering/querying, masculine-of-centering, closeted bisexual questioning), family/ancestral heritage (American/Black histories), pop culture (escapism via fantasy, public personas and invasion of privacy), and gentrification (desecration of sacred spaces, displacement, whiteness and entitlement, etc.) Currently, I'm working on a novel that explores how families and communities deal with grief and loss in the midst of gentrification. Also, I’m dreaming of ways to create multi-media works that amplify Black angst, Black joy and Black noise.

Pallavi Sharma Dixit (she/her) earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships and has taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children and is at work on a novel.

Fellowship Statement

I was born in India and raised in Edison, New Jersey – a Little India in America – and this history informs all my writing.

When I earned degrees in history from the University of Pennsylvania I didn’t know how I would use them, but it turns out this is how: my fiction examines Indian immigration, Thomas Edison’s work ethic, anti-Indian racism, the evolution of Indian film, and the transformation of an American suburb into an ethnic enclave.

My novel-in-progress, Edison, deals also with romance, obsession, anxiety and the pressure of the American Dream. It is influenced both by the Bollywood movies and American sitcoms I grew up on. At every turn it bears the imprint of my life.

I try not to let my process be all agony; I find the humor and amuse myself. I like when movie stars unexpectedly enter my scenes. And I like em dashes so much.