THE 2021 KWELI WRITING FELLOWS
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved
We are pleased to introduce you to our 2021 Kweli Writing Fellows, twelve truth tellers who are brilliant, bold and unafraid. They are definers in their own right.
Their projects range from literary fiction and creative nonfiction, to novels-in-verse for teens and picture books for children. Through close reading and revision, Fellows will take a “deep dive” into their individual craft, an undertaking rarely provided outside MFA Creative Writing programs. In addition, they will expand their reading horizons, learn about editors’ expectations, gain a toolkit for navigating the publishing industry as professional writers, join a community of committed peers and mentors, and advance their public profile.
Kukuwa Ashun is a progeny of Ghanaian immigrants. As a first-generation college student, her work is informed by identity formation in coming-of-age Black women and social exclusion across race, gender, class, creed, and mobility.
Anabel Soto is an emerging writer from the Dominican Republic who centers her work around immigrant voices with the goal of amplifying the visibility of people of color through children’s books, poetry and creative nonfiction.
Delia Selina Taylor is an Afro-Latina writer and editor born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing is largely concerned with voicelessness, music, and the performativity of race and gender. She is currently working on a novel.
Arpita Chakrabarty is a fiction writer and freelance journalist covering rural India. Her work centers people on the margins of Indian society, women and children who are grappling with poverty, identity, climate change and sexual violence.
Radhiyah Ayobami is Brooklyn-born with Southern roots. She lives with her teenage son in New York City, where she is at work on her first novel and a collection of lyric essays. The trees give her poems.
Amy Haejung is writing in an important space of linking queerness and Asian-American identities and doing it in a way that remakes language and narrative. Her work touches on the nature of memory and its instabilities, history and its omissions.
Lemny Perez is an Afro-Dominican Buddhist, international psychologist and painter. She lives in Washington Heights, New York, where she is at work on a collection of essays and a graphic novel.
Chaya Babu is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently working on a memoir about the inherited trauma of exile and the impossibility of return post diaspora.
Diana Quiñones is an 8th grade English teacher in the Lower East Side by day and a writer by night. She is working on a young adult novel and collaborating around language arts as a practice of justice.
Shamecca Harris is a writer and teaching artist born and raised in Harlem, New York City. She is thoroughly caught up in all the possibilities of creative nonfiction, from the personal essay to the lyric essay to editorial and narrative forms.
Bahar Mirhosseini has had the great privilege to work with public defenders in the U.S., Palestine, and Tunisia. She is currently working on a series of linked short stories set in Ramallah.
Nasugraq Rainey Hopson is a tribally enrolled Inupiaq born in Barrow, Alaska (now known as Utqiagvik). She is working on a series of picture books for children and a novel for teens.
