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 June 6 - 15, 2024 and will be held virtually. The program costs $2,400, 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 February 29, 2024. Please note: the application deadline has been extended to March 17, 2024. Submit your work to be eligible for fellowships.

Applications are reviewed by an anonymous admission board of peers, which rotates every year. Notifications will be sent out starting February 15, 2024 (including notifications of fellowships). A non-refundable security deposit of $150 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

Natashia Deón

Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Grace, which was named a best book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Root, Kirkus Review, Book Riot, and Entropy Magazine, and has been featured in People Magazine, TIME Magazine, and Red Book. Grace won the 2017 American Library Association, Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction. She is also the author of the novel The Perishing, which was nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award. A practicing attorney, mother, and law professor, Deón is the recipient of a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship and served as a 2017 U.S. Delegate to Armenia in partnership with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, for a reconciliation project involving Armenian and Turkish writers.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

Interdisciplinary poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of Village (Coffee House Press 2023) and TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). She is also the author of three chapbooks, which include Ichi- Ban and Ni-Ban (MOH Press), Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladonna*), and the album Televisíon. Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a 2016 Whiting Award and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard College, and lives in New York City.

Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney has published seven collections, including Optic Subwoof (2022), the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Sho (2021), Buck Studies (2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and California Book Award silver medalist (Poetry). M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues (2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” WIRE magazine calls Fodder (2021), a live album featuring Kearney and frequent collaborator, Val-Inc., “Brilliant.” Kearney is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. His operas include Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, Sweet Land (the Music Critics of North America’s Best Opera of 2021), and Comet / Poppea commissioned by AMOC (American Modern Opera Company). He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Altadena, CA, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.

Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, Cutlish, and Whale Aria;a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. Mohabir has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Ladan Osman

Ladan Osman is a Somali born artist whose work is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press) and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. Her most recent collection Exiles of Eden, is a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Roar, Rumpus, among others. Osman’s writing has been translated into over 10 languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Anna Ghosh

Ghosh Literary is an independent literary agency founded by Anna Ghosh.  Anna started her career as a literary agent in New York city in 1995 and was previously a partner at Scovil Galen Ghosh. The agency offers world wide literary representation for print and digital media and all allied rights, including motion picture, theatrical and multimedia rights. Anna’s client list includes New York Times bestsellers, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim and other awards, as well as unheralded gems.  Her literary interests are wide and eclectic and she is known for discovering and developing writers.  She is particularly interested in literary narratives and books that illuminate some aspect of human endeavor or the natural world.  Anna does not typically represent genre fiction but is drawn to compelling storytelling in most guises. Anna studied Cultural Anthropology and Literary Journalism at Hampshire College, Massachusetts and Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research, New York. Originally from India, Anna lived in New York city for 16 years and now lives in San Francisco, California.