Writing Residency

About

Anaphora Writing Residency is a ten-day program designed exclusively for writers of color. The residency offers workshops, readings, craft talks, and discussions with professionals from the literary and publishing industry. The goal of the program is to nurture emerging and established writers of color, to create opportunities for publication, and establish a wide network of support for writers of different backgrounds.

Dates & Fees

The upcoming residency will run on February 19 - 28, 2026 and will be held virtually. The program costs $2,800, and several partial fellowships are available every year, depending on funding availability. Applications must be submitted by the priority deadline to be eligible for fellowships. Anaphora Fellows and returning alumnx, will have the opportunity to attend the program at a discounted rate.

Applications are now open! The priority deadline is October 25th; applications will still be accepted until October 30th. Applications are reviewed by an anonymous admission board of peers, which rotates every year. Notifications will be sent out at the end of October (including notifications of fellowships). A non-refundable security deposit of $300 is required within two weeks of notification; program fees must be paid entirely prior to the beginning of the residency.

If you have any questions, please check out the residency’s FAQ page, or contact us.

What to Expect

The program will provide workshops in poetry and prose, craft talks, daily readings (by guests and program participants), masterclasses, generative sessions, and discussions with professionals from the industry, including literary agents, editors, and publishers.

Speakers

Chris Abani

Chris Abani’s books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Smoking the Bible, Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian.

Fatimah Asghar

Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer, Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer who cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. They are the author of If They Come For Us, When We Were Sisters, and the chapbook After. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. In 2017, they were a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and listed on Forbes’s 30 under 30 list.

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, among others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Nick Makoha

His debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, the Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Boston Review, and Callaloo. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize.

Daniel Simon

Daniel joined the staff of World Literature Today in 2002. A Nebraska native, he received his MA (1994) and PhD (2000) in comparative literature—with an emphasis in translation studies—from Indiana University, Bloomington. At OU, in addition to his work at WLT, he teaches for the Department of English and serves on the affiliate faculty of the Department of International & Area Studies and the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies. A poet, essayist, and translator, his edited volume, Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, received a 2018 Nebraska Book Award, and his newest edited collection, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020), was a Publishers Weekly starred pick. His third book of poems, Under a Gathering Sky, appeared in 2024. Daniel’s poems have been nominated for multiple prizes, including seven Pushcarts; translated into French, German, Greek, Spanish, and Turkish; and reprinted in the anthologies World English Poetry (2015), Oklahoma Poems . . . and Their Poets (2014), and Voices Now: World Poetry Today (2022). He and his wife have three daughters.

Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier is author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, and BOMB, among many others. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as the 2024-25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.