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.

Chia-Lun Chang (she/her) was born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Her work appears in Literary Hub, PEN America, Hyperallergic, Bettering American Poetry Volume 2, Vinyl, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, and Bone Bouquet, among other publications. She’s the author of a chapbook, One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2016) and has been supported by fellowships from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tofte Lake Center, and Poets House.

Fellowship Statement

I came to the United States to continue my studies, earning a second bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a master’s degree in poetry. In these programs and through my work in the writing community, I have deepen my understanding of colonization, women’s rights, and patriotism. Even today, it is difficult to find authentic representations of Taiwan, written by ethnic minorities and native people. Seeking representation, I found two books which spoke to me—Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire and Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I admire Césaire for combining anger, violence, colors and temperatures. In Dictée, Cha uses the text as an extension of her body and demonstrates the possibility of developing one’s own multilingual, hybrid-genre voice. With Cha and Césaire as my guides, I have been working on a poetry memoir in which I grapple with the conflict and confusion of identity issues, the lost history of island residents, postwar survival, the causes of female oppression, and the act of speaking out. As a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, I will expand my first chapbook, One Day We Become Whites, into a book-length project—a Taiwanese poetry memoir.

D. Allen (they/them) is a multidisciplinary poet and artist living in Minneapolis. Their first hybrid poetry collection, A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe (The Operating System, 2019), weaves together poems, lyric essays, dictionary erasures, and images in response to the poet's diagnosis with a connective tissue disorder, asking: What holds us together when the body falls apart? D.’s writing has appeared in QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, District Lit, Rogue Agent, Lockjaw Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. D. has recently received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, an Emerging Artist Grant from VSA Minnesota, and a Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from The Loft; they have been a resident at the Mallard Island Artist Residency, The Lighthouse Works, Write On Door County, the Andrews Forest, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. D. earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota in 2017.

Fellowship Statement

D.’s poetic practice is oriented around presence. Their work takes many forms: word architectures, light drawings, textured surfaces, slow dinners, layered sounds, sustained listening, temporary assemblages, quiet gardening, exploratory movements. Through their work across media and disciplines, D. navigates pain and illness, queer kinship, sex and intimacy, the natural world, and the realities of queer, genderqueer and disabled embodiment. Collaboration and relationship-building are vital to D.’s artistic life.

Currently, D. is developing their first full-length stage work using text, images, light, sound, movement, and large-scale handknit textiles with the support of a 2019 Q-Stage: New Works Fellowship from 20% Theatre Company. D. is also working on a collection of researched lyric essays, while pursuing new collaborations and smaller-scale experimental projects across disciplines.

Photo by poet Roy G. Guzmán.

André M. Zachery (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and founding artistic director of Brooklyn-based Renegade Performance Group (RPG). Zachery’s practice, research and community engagement artistically focuses on Black/African Diaspora cultural practices through the mediums of choreography, site-specific projects, film, digital projection, audio installations and responsive technology. He is a former Jerome Foundation supported Movement Research artist-in-residence and a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship/Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography. He has served as a guest faculty artist in dance departments at Florida State University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Ohio State University. His works have received acclaimed reviews from the New York Times, Culturebot and other notable publications. RPG has presented work at Danspace Project, The Kennedy Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Harlem Stage and the Brooklyn Museum. Zachery extensively collaborates with artists of various genres and mediums to create innovative projects that expand notions of performance and space.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in dimensionality as a means to disrupt and dismantle hierarchy. Currently, my work and research in Afrofuturism reconsiders the relationship of the Black body in digital landscapes to recoding (virtual) reality. The presence, experiences and narratives of the African Diaspora are severely lacking in the field of performance and technology. For me dimensionality offers the ability to shape and form our stories, legacies, myths and sense of place with complexity and nuance in consideration to time. Moving forward, I want to find ways to actualize the conversation and theory of Black futurity into physical and material spaces.  I want people to input their information into a constructed environment where the material and physical architectures interact cohesively with supporting sonic and visual elements, exploring how Afrofuturism can be a generative mechanism to address societal issues with parity, equity and resourcefulness

Photo by Rachel Neville.

Darrius Strong (he/him) is a Twin Cities based choreographer, dancer, and educator whose creative work has been performed in Walker Art Center’s Choreographers Evening and Rhythmically Speaking. He was featured in the 2015 New Griots Festival as well as an American Standard Billboard advertisement in New York City Time Square in 2016. He was a 2017 Momentum New Works recipient. Strong has created works for Threads Dance Project, Flying Foot Forum, Alternative Motion Projects, and most recently was commissioned to create a new work for James Sewell Ballet. Strong developed his own dance company STRONGmovement in 2015. He is a faculty member at Saint Paul Conservatory Performing Arts High School, TU Dance Center. At Eleve Performing Arts Center, he teaches young dancers how to connect their identity to movement. Strong is also a company member of Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater.

Fellowship Statement

I tell stories through movement. I feel that our bodies tell stories and it’s up to us as individuals to define those stories. As a child it was hard for me to communicate my feelings through words, so I began to rely on movement as an outlet in times of sadness, frustration, anger, and other emotions.

I created my own dance company, STRONGmovement, because I truly believe that movement empowers conversation between dancers and audiences. Conversation invokes community building, an aspect of my background in hip hop I center in my work. Through the movement I create, I desire to empower others, create communities, inspire people to invest in themselves and their stories.

Photo by Bill Cameron.

Deneane Richburg (she/her) grew up a competitive figure skater, spending time in spaces where she felt she had to check her racial/cultural identity at the door, as the predominantly white skating world excluded her ancestry’s truths. To quote Zora Neale Hurston, Deneane always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” As an adult, she realized the need to carve out a space for her ancestral history, so she established Brownbody, a creative home for her artistic work that fuses theater, dance, social justice practice, and skating. Through Brownbody, she honors the complex narratives of Black diasporic communities. As a modern dance choreographer and skater, Deneane is interested in expanding creative expression on the ice by engaging ancestral narratives as a framework for movement exploration. Deneane is a grateful recipient of a 2017 McKnight Choreography Fellowship administered by the Cowles Center and funded by The McKnight Foundation.

Fellowship Statement

I fuse different movement worlds; a modern dance choreographer that presents works on and off of the ice. The themes of my work range from visual objectification through the story of Saartjie Baartman to issues of re-memory through a piece based on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My latest on ice evening length work is Quiet As It’s Kept, which focuses on the Reconstruction era and rise of Jim Crow laws. I’m interested in ensemble work on the ice. As a dancer I’ve performed with companies in ensemble pieces and have learned to appreciate the intricacies and manipulation of group nuances—engaging many bodies to create a fully realized and unified statement. I am interested in exploring the power of these elements on the ice in telling stories relevant to my ancestral history. Currently I am working on an ice ensemble piece that explores American Black social dances of the 17th through 19th centuries.

Photo by Alice Gebura.

As an independent choreographer and Choreographic Associate with Ragamala Dance Company, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s (she/her) work references ancient myths and ritualistic practices, global literature and poetry, and the mixed media contemporary culture she has absorbed for over 30 years. Her work draws from myriad influences to express a personal identity with universal resonance. Celebrated for her ability to “[weave] together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine” (New York Times), Ashwini has studied Bharatanatyam since the age of five. She has toured extensively with Ragamala, performing throughout the U.S. and in Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, the U.K, and India. Ashwini's choreographic work has been presented by the Cowles Center, the Yard, and the Joyce Theater, among others. Her work is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s US Artist International, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, among others.

Fellowship Statement

I have spent decades steeped in the south Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam. I am committed to maintaining the beauty, technique, rigor, and values embedded in the form as it has been taught to me, while creating my own personal vision of women’s representation in performance. Like a phantom limb, my Indian ancestry lingers within me, informing my artistic work and daily interactions; my upbringing in both India and the U.S. has encouraged an aesthetic perspective with a hybrid internal compass. As an artist of diaspora, I am a cultural carrier with an instinct to move within ancestral patterns. There is a continuum between what we perceive as real/tangible and what we accept as unknown/unknowable; this gravitation between the human, the natural, and the metaphysical—which are forever engaged in sacred movement—is a focal point in my work.

Photo by Ed Bock.