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PEN USA Announces 2005 Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows
December 01, 2004
PEN USA announces its six $1,000 Rosenthal Fellowships to emerging writers from minority, immigrant and underserved communities for the 2005 cycle of its Emerging Voices program. The fellowships are made possible by the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation which supports outstanding work from not-yet-established writers and artists.
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Designed to serve writers working on a specific project who are ready to be published, Emerging Voices is an intensive, eight-month program that includes a one-on-one mentoring relationship with an established writer, master classes with established novelists, classes in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, informal visits with writers, and literary readings.
The 2005 Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows are Cynthia Bond, Jawanza Dumisani, Robbie Frandsen, Qevin Oji, Lan Tran, and Alia Yunis.
Cynthia Bond is a writer and educator. After years of teaching creative writing to homeless youth, she is focusing her energy on completing her novel Ruby, which explores the effects of tyranny and racism in Liberty, an all-black East Texas town. Through Ruby’s eyes we journey into madness as she haunts the red roads and piney woods. Memories of lynching, voodoo rites, and the murder of children walk beside her. Ruby explores the secrets kept just under the soil of Liberty.
Jawanza Dumisani is Director of the Anansi Poetry Workshop at the World Stage. Hard work and his cathedral of language have earned him respect throughout LA’s literary community. His first chapbook, Stoetry, was an editor’s choice on FoxStarFire Press, and Beyond Baroque selected him as an emerging voice in the 2003 LA Poetry Festival. A Detroit native, Dumisani will use the Fellowship to help further his first novel, Nails, Flowers, Blood, and Stone, a tale of Motown in the 1960s.
Robbie Frandsen is a community re-entry specialist for ex-prison inmates, and also teaches reading and writing to adults. She is at work on the unfolding story of her experience as the mother of a young man with no criminal record charged with two counts of first-degree murder, still incarcerated in Los Angeles awaiting trial. The working title of the book is Loving Thin These Walls, which is a line from a poem her son wrote for her.
Qevin Oji is a graduate of Howard University in Washington D.C., where he founded and published the Anacostia Grapevine newspaper, and directed The Gallery of Good Hope and the Open City arts initiative. As playwriting fellow with Wordsmyths, he wrote the recently produced Roach Killers. Oji won the Jerry Jazz Short Fiction Contest for Anacostia. He currently teaches Literature and Composition at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. During his Fellowship Oji will complete his novel, Moving Days, an Angel City coming-of-age tale.
Lan Tran is working on Lone Stars, a tragic-comic nonfiction collection drawn from her Vietnamese-Texan upbringing in the ‘70s. Weaving childhood memories with stories from her family’s past, she explores one family’s transgression of borders, both personal and geographic, in crafting a modern American tale.
Alia Yunis is a screenwriter and freelancer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times. She received a Warner Bros. Comedy Writing award. During her Fellowship, Yunis will work on The Key to My House, a novel about an 85-year old Arab-American woman who gets nightly visits from Scheherazade and who knows that by the 1001st visit, she will die. Before then, she must decide who will inherit her parents’ home in Lebanon, a house she herself has not seen in more than 60 years.
“PEN is pleased to offer writers of promise access to resources that will strengthen their skills and create new opportunities,” says Eitan Kadosh, PEN USA Program Director. “It is important for PEN to be involved in launching what we know will be productive writing careers.”
Past mentors have included Mona Simpson, Carolyn See, Bernard Cooper, Susan Taylor Chehak, Greg Sarris, Harryette Mullen, Karen Yamashita, Aimee Liu, Terry Wolverton, Janet Fitch, Jervey Tervalon, and Judith Freeman.
PEN Center USA West (PEN USA), founded in 1952, is part of an international organization of professional writers created in 1921 to defend freedom of expression and foster a vital literary community worldwide. With more than 1,200 members, PEN West is the third largest of 130 international PEN centers and one of two centers in the United States.
Comments:
please let me know how i can join.
thanks and rgrds,
rubanaahmed@yahoo.com