Past Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows
2007 EMERGING VOICES /ROSENTHAL FELLOWS
Alisha Westerman was born on the island of St. Croix and raised in Southern California with four younger siblings. She earned her BA in Creative Studies from UC Santa Barbara in 2003. She has worked as a freelance copywriter and photographer, and writes the songs for her Long Beach band, Mellow Mood. In her poetry she explores her Caribbean American heritage and is now focusing on her Russian Jewish relatives who settled in New York at the turn of the century. She has been published in Spectrum and Catalyst.
Avi Lall has an unhealthy fascination with memoirs, biographies, testimonies, and confessions, in the impulse to tell the story of our lives. He is writing a novel about one Diego, a musician and fool, with no such impulse. Avi grew up in the diametrically opposed worlds of Venice and Carlsbad, California. Currently, he spends his days in cold rooms, rebooting computers, and plugging in cables.
Amahl Khouri was born in Arlington, Virginia, grew up in the Middle East, and studied at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. She is working on a collection of poems titled, Canicule, which explores the quiet details of everyday life on three continents while homelands burn in the distance.
Juan Carlos Castro spent the greater part of his youth in the New York City metro area where he attended New York University. Over the past several years he has published a number of articles and three short stories, among them The Burning of Father Amelio’s Church, the story of a priest who burns down his church because of an infestation of mice in the walls. He sits on the Board of Contributing Writers for Tertulia Magazine, and is presently at work on his first novel.
Mario Rocha discovered his voice as a writer while locked up at Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. His writings have appeared in several independent newspapers, magazines, and journals. He is also the subject of Mario’s Story, winner of the 2006 audience award for best documentary at the L.A. Film Festival. As an Emerging Voices Fellow, he hopes to complete an almost 10-year collection of writings titled, Young Lifer: A Prisoner’s Quest for Justice & Freedom.
Melinda Palacio grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Santa Barbara. She holds two Comparative Literature degrees—a B.A. from UC Berkeley and a Master’s from UC Santa Cruz. Her latest venture is inkbyte.com, an online magazine for writers. Her projects include City Mija: A Memoir in Poems and Bathroom Girls: Growing Up in South Central L.A., a collection of short stories. She is currently working on a novel.
Sheela Sukumaran was born and raised in military cantonments across northern and central India, and formed her early impressions of civilian life from everyday accounts of classmates at school. She received her Masters in management from XLRI Jamshedpur, after which she pursued a career in human resources. She found writing during the intense years of new motherhood. Sheela was long-listed for the Fish International Short Story Prize 2005/6, and a finalist for the John Steinbeck Prize 2005/6. She will use the Fellowship to work on a short story collection, tentatively titled Smudged Spaces, which explores themes of competing desires and blurred boundaries in human relationships and circumstances.
Sandra Ramirez-Thomas is a Los Angeles native and a photographer. Her short story, The Twins, was a finalist in the 2005 Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. She is currently at work on her first collection of short stories titled, Pictures, which explores the fragile relationship between the fear and desire for intimacy.
2006 EMERGING VOICES/ROSENTHAL FELLOWS
Anna Alves received her BA in English and History and MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA. She has worked in arts philanthropy as a grantmaker and also in nonprofit arts organizations in planning, programs and development. She is working on her first novel, Afterlives , the story of a young woman who visits the Philippines and stumbles onto a matriarchal legacy of wondrous tales, willful lives, and anonymous ghosts.
Mark Dennis is a writer, social worker, real estate agent and political activist. His short story, “Max and Julian” was a finalist in the 2004 Writer’s Digest Short Short Fiction Competition. He is currently at work on his first collection of short-short fiction titled Sides.
Ayofemi Folayan served as Artist-In-Residence at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center where she developed Writing as a Healing Art and WordPlay! Programs. She has published essays and short fiction. She plans to complete her novel, Elmwood, about the nascent Civil Rights Movement in a small town near Birmingham.
Evangeline Ganaden’s poetry celebrates immigrants and their memories of home, their culture, and the journeys that brought them here. Her lyrics of loss and isolation, of separation and displacement, and of the courage, faith, and hope that sustain immigrants in their struggle for belonging and identity shape her current project, Ashes of Home.
Persephone Gonzalez is a poet and educator born in Torrance, California. She has read and performed her work in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. She was a member of the award-winning DramaDIVAS, a theater group for lgbt youth of color founded by Cherrie Moraga. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript titled, Empalaga, which discusses race, family, women and desire.
Evelyn Ibarra was born and raised in Minnesota. She lived in California for seventeen years working as an economist, city planner and architect before finding poetry. She is working on a collection of poems titled Working Drawings that explores various cities, and offers a narrative of a girl’s acclimation to language, custom and the immediate space around her, natural and manmade.
Laurie Dea Owyang is a human resources consultant who conducts sexual harassment prevention training. She is working on a collection of memoir/essays currently titled Store Babies about the circumstances under which her parents fled China to escape poverty and war, and their ongoing quest to improve their lives and their childrens’ lives.
Sergio Reyes spent his childhood in the playgrounds of Pico Rivera and the cornfields of Los Altos de Jalisco, Mexico. He earned his Bachelors from Stanford and a Masters from Harvard, after which he developed a career in software development and design. He is currently developing an interlinked collection of novellas called Dos Ojos, which explores the themes of border crossing, both literally and figuratively, amor desamor (the opposite of love), and reconciliation.
Harold Terezon is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on a poetry manuscript based on his family’s experiences in the United States, as well as in El Salvador titled mi casita.
Ricardo Wilson, a Los Angeles native, is working to complete his first book The Death of Sam Brown an epistolary novel documenting the West Indian experience during construction of the Panama Canal. He has spent a large part of the past two years writing and researching in Panama and Jamaica, and currently works at UCLA .