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 August 12 - 21, 2021, 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. Our Founding Fellows and returning alumnx, will have the opportunity to attend the program at a discounted rate.

Applications are now open! The priority deadline is May 10th, with the final deadline on May 15th. NOTE: The deadline has been extended to May 20, 2021. Applications are reviewed by an anonymous admission board of peers, which rotates every year. Notifications will be sent out by May 31st (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

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays, including, most recently, Nebraska (UNP, 2019), Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019), and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), co-written with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Natashia Deón

Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Grace (Counterpoint Press), 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. 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.

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.

Sasha Pimentel

Born in Manila and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is the author of For Want of Water, selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series and longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award, and Insides She Swallowed, winner of the American Book Award. She has published poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, ESPN, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Literary Hub, and other literary publications. She has been a Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Universität Leipzig in Germany, an NEA fellow, and March 2021's guest editor for Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets. She teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the bilingual (Español-English) Department of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México.

Matthew Shenoda

Matthew Shenoda is a writer, professor, university administrator, and author and editor of several books. His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. His debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press), was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and was winner of a 2006 American Book Award. He is also the author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (BOA Editions Ltd.), editor of Duppy Conqueror: New & Selected Poems by Kwame Dawes, and most recently author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award and with Kwame Dawes editor of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017). Shenoda teaches in the fields of ethnic studies and creative writing and has held faculty and administrative positions at various institutions. He has served as the assistant provost for equity and diversity at CalArts and dean of academic diversity, equity and inclusion at Columbia College Chicago. He currently serves as the Vice President and Associate Provost for Social Equity & Inclusion at Rhode Island School of Design.

Anni Liu

Anni Liu is a poet, essayist, translator and editor. Her poetry collection Border Vista (Persea, 2022) won the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She was born and raised in 西安, 陕西, then later in Bowling Green, Ohio. She earned her MFA from Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor of Indiana Review. Her work is featured in Ploughshares, Ecotone, the Georgia Review, Two Lines, Hyphen, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and elsewhere, and her honors include an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to Bread Loaf Environmental Conference, and the National Society for Arts and Letters’ Literature Award. She’s also been supported by the Mae Fellowship and awarded a residency at the Anderson Center at Tower View in Red Wing, MN. She is Associate Editor at Graywolf Press, and lives in Minneapolis with her partner and plants.

Annie Hwang

Before joining Ayesha Pande Literary, Annie began her career at Folio Literary Management where she had the pleasure of working with debut and seasoned authors alike. As a former journalist, Annie possesses a keen editorial eye which she brings to her approach to agenting, taking an active role in the careers of her clients. Annie represents voice-driven literary fiction and select nonfiction. In particular, she gravitates toward subversive and irreverent literary fiction and impactful mission-driven narrative nonfiction that grapples with the complexities of our world. A fierce champion of underrepresented voices, Annie is always on the hunt for gifted storytelling that stretches its genre to new heights.