Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an Assistant Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work charts cross-cultural connections and dislocations, while tracing the enmeshed nature of seeing and of being seen. I’m invested in the concept of opacity: the right to be unknowable—and unmarketable—and the implications of being a site of continually shifting contradictions and unstatic experience.

Recently, my poems have been driven by slippages and scramblings in tenses—when the past ruptures into the present, or when the future leaks into the past—and by forms of historical, collective, and personal memory and postmemory that warp, stain, disfigure, and erode.

I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity.

Debra J. Stone is a writer of essays, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been published in Jarnal Literary Journal, Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, and forthcoming in other literary journals. She has received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New York Mills Arts Residency and is a Kimbilio Fellow. Sundress Publishers nominated her essay, “Grandma Essie’s Vanilla Poundcake,” Best of the Net, judged by Hanif Abdurraquib in 2019 and in 2021 her short fiction, “year-of- staying–in place,” was Best of Net and Pushcart nominated. Debra is chair of the board directors at Graywolf Press in Minneapolis and board member of the Northwoods Writing Conference in Bemidji, Minnesota. She resides in Minneapolis. https://www.debrajeannestone.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will research the migration of my family and travel to the Black towns of Missouri, Oklahoma and the town my ancestors founded when they were Exodusters and ranchers during the Nebraska territory. Currently, I am working on The House on Rondo, a novel-in-progress. As this is a new project, I am developing new skills through workshops, mentors and other tools to complete a finished draft. I am interested in my work joining in the dialogue regarding reparations for the descendants of the destroyed Rondo neighborhood and the ancestors whose generational wealth was stolen from them.

Photo by Anna Min of Min Enterprises.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested and compelled by communal memory, tall tales, and Black expressions of gender and divergence. Inspired by the Black American diaspora to which I belong, I am working on a book about the intersection of family, American surveillance, and Black radical faith. Following the life and lineage of protagonist Alphonso–descendant of a slave and slave owner in a small cotton town of Edgefield North Carolina–as he evolves and shape-shifts from petty criminal and womanizer to sober foot soldier and eventual minister of Islamic Temple No. 1 in New York City. BORN AGAIN is biomythography exploring the consequences of melanin, locomotion, and generational curses.

Photo by Justin J. Wee.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use the fellowship term to explore possibilities for layering sound, integrating graphics and text into literary readings, and imagining new possibilities for venues where literary readings take place. I am interested in how technology and other approaches can expand access to live performance. My interests are inspired by a desire to connect with audiences in a more meaningful way and by my recent work focused on thinking about the potential uses for paper and the physical page.

Photo by Ayanna Muata.

Halee Kirkwood is a poet, teaching artist, and bookseller living in Minneapolis. Kirkwood earned their MFA from Hamline University. They are an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) fellow, a Loft Mentor Series Fellow, a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a recent artist-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. Kirkwood is the winner of the 2022 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Artists, published with Poetry Northwest. Their work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Kirkwood is the faculty editor of Runestone Journal, a national undergraduate literary annual. Originally from Superior, Wisconsin, they are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My primary concern as a writer is to radically redefine nature and place-based poetry. Rather than poetry that presents a static, passive portrait of nature and place, I am invested in writing that embodies living ecologies and histories, poetry that necessitates deep attention, specificity, humility, justice, and action. I am currently focused on two landscapes in my work that I plan to continue work on during my fellowship period. First, I plan to continue my poetry manuscript-in-progress on collisions of class within manufactured ecologies, braiding my experience as a life-long retail worker from a low-income background with a sense of scientific observation. Second, I plan on advancing my writing on the Lake Superior region by beginning a lyric essay manuscript, tracing the Ojibwe migration path along the shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence river areas. Through this nascent project, I want to explore what it means to be a mixed white & Ojibwe traveler through prose, inviting in periods of research, interview, and lyric immersion.

Gen Del Raye (he/him) is half Japanese and was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. His debut story collection, Boundless Deep & Other Stories, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. His writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Best Small Fictions 2017, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. Currently, he lives in Minneapolis, MN, where he loves the winters and misses the ocean.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My upbringing in Japan and subsequent move to the US when I was eighteen reflects a complicated mix of privilege and othering, and I strive to explore this truthfully and honestly through my work. My forthcoming book, Boundless Deep & Other Stories, is a portrait of a mixed-race family that holds together despite the societal, historical, and linguistic pressures that threaten to pull it apart. Outside of my writing, I work as a translator and interpreter, and I try to use the skills gained through this work to inform my creation of multilingual fiction. Right now, I am particularly interested in finding new ways to carry the puns and wittiness of non-English dialogue into English-language stories in a way that privileges bilingual readers.

Photo by Xue Feng.

Solomon J Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They were a Tin House Graphic Narrative Resident in Fall 2021. Their work is often about memory and mourning in the aftermath of violence, intertwined colonial histories, and joyful resistance to fascism everywhere. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach as adjunct faculty in history, media, and gender studies. Their first monograph, the graphic nonfiction work Heavyweight, is forthcoming from William Morrow.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am currently in the process of completing a graphic nonfiction book, Heavyweight, which interrogates my own family history in the context of European colonialism and the Holocaust, and multidirectional memory from a third generation perspective. My work is deeply invested in accessible communication of ideas through visual storytelling, and the work that pictures and words do together. As a trained historian, my comics are research driven, and I encounter analog painting as a way of sitting with the stories I’m working to tell. During the Jerome Foundation Fellowship, I hope to expand my practice in new directions, while developing a graphic novel project based on archival research, which will tell the story of a multigenerational haunting and organized crime in the world of Jewish Baltimore.

Victoria Blanco is a writer from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Her first book, Out of the Sierra, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2023. The research and writing for this book were supported by a Fulbright Award, with additional research, grant and residency opportunities supported by the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, BreadLoaf, East Side Freedom Library as part of Coffee House Press’ In-the-Stacks and the 2018 Roxane Gay Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction at the Jack Jones Literary Arts writers’ retreat. Blanco’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult and Bat City Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a Fellow in the 2017–2018 Loft Mentor Series.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am beginning work on my second book, which will use archival footage, oral history, family stories, and personal memory to narrate the story of the U.S.-Mexico border as it runs through the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The book will also focus on the sin fronteras/no borders movement that is rooted in these cities, with the aim of imagining the sister cities as borderless.

Alex Bijan Zandi is an Iranian-American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work explores the social difficulties and enchantments of the Middle Eastern diaspora. Zandi studied creative writing at the Washington University in St. Louis where he received the Howard Nemerov Prize for Poetry. He went on to receive an MFA in Film/Video at Bard College. Zandi was a 2022 Reykjavík Film Festival Talent Lab fellow and in 2021 participated in the MACRO x The Black List Feature Screenwriter Incubator. His films have been screened internationally at venues such as the Amsterdam International Film Festival (Best Experimental Film Award), Abrons Art Center, Knockdown Center, Petzel Gallery, and 15 Orient Gallery. Zandi is currently developing his first narrative feature film, Saffron Threads with Rathaus Films.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work seeks naturalism with fantasy, observation with emotive empathy, narrative logic with poetic enigma. I believe that aesthetic experience is more profound when thinking and feeling is activated both internally and at a critical distance. This mantra reflects my subjectivity as an Iranian-American: the double-consciousness of being a unique individual with desires and flaws, while simultaneously being an “other” projected by a post 9/11 society.

During my fellowship, I will work toward making Saffron Threads. Through the eyes of an Iranian-American teenager, the film chronicles societal crossfire after 9/11 and the rise of the alt-right in suburban Boston. I will also develop a new project that explores the intergenerational trauma stemming from the multiple Iranian Revolutions and the possibility of cultural redemption.

Photo by Taylor Brophy.

Merit Thursday (he/him) is a white, queer, and transsexual experimental animator, educator, and curator. He teaches in the animation department at MCAD, and has experience in youth arts programming in the Twin Cities. As a curator, he has hosted and programmed local screening series such as Cinema Lounge, queer series Video Variant, and the currently running Weird Stuff Only. As an independent filmmaker, Thursday is partial to screening his works on the local and DIY level, but has also screened works globally.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As an independent animator, I have been noticing the ways that I feel pulled both towards the pre-cinema animation practices, as well as the new media and algorithmic techniques developing today. I feel excited to use this time as a fellow to extend my practice in both directions. Firstly, I have been exploring and excited by the ways that my analog or traditional practices can be manipulated in surprising ways using algorithmic functions of video editing software. I am reaching a point where the pre-built algorithmic processors are getting better at their intended functions, which doesn't feel exciting to me. I will be using this time to learn how to build my own processors, so that I can better rely on the chance, circumstance, and surprise of a somewhat broken machine. Additionally, I am always fascinated by pre-cinema techniques, such as crankies, puppetry, shadow theater, and optical toys. I will also be spending this time researching these practices and integrating them into my digital realm. I am so humbled and excited by the opportunity and spaciousness to expand my technical reach and be able to answer questions in new ways.