The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) is pleased to announce its literary fellows for the 2022-23 season.
Jaquira Díaz, Melissa Febos, Nabila Lovelace, and Anna Qu are this year’s Shearing Fellows, while Fakhria Rasikh is the newest City of Asylum Fellow. They join Ahmed Naji, City of Asylum Fellow, and Amanda Fortini, the Beverly Rogers Fellow already in residence.
“BMI is thrilled to welcome the new Shearing and City of Asylum fellows. What’s remarkable about this group — individually and together — is that they, their work, and their interest in being a part of the community at UNLV and in Las Vegas speak to what’s important right now in their worlds and ours,” said Colette LaBouff, BMI executive director.
“We recognize them as part of the heart of BMI’s inspiring community. We look forward to supporting their work, and we are already inspired by their presence.”
Each year, BMI offers the Shearing Fellowship to writers who have published at least one book by a trade or literary press. These writers-in-residence contribute to the arts scene of UNLV and the Las Vegas community through readings, workshops, and other public programming. The fellowship is supported by and named for Miriam Shearing, the first woman to serve as a Nevada district judge and as justice and chief justice of the Supreme Court of Nevada.
BMI also offers the City of Asylum Fellowship, created to provide safe haven to writers who have been persecuted for their literary work. The program allows them to write freely without censorship, risk of imprisonment, or threats to their personal safety. The first of its kind in the U.S., the program now has sister programs in Pittsburgh, Ithaca, and Detroit.
2022-23 Black Mountain Institute Fellows
Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads pick, and finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, VCCA, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She teaches at Colorado State University’s MFA program and Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program.
Febos is the bestselling author of Whip Smart, Abandon Me—a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and Publishing Triangle Award finalist, Girlhood—LAMBDA Award finalist, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, and the Barbara Deming Foundation. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa. At BMI, she’ll work on her fifth book, The Dry Season, a work of mixed-form nonfiction that combines research and memoir to explore celibacy as a liberatory practice.
Lovelace is a first-generation Queens-born poet whose family hails from Trinidad and Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. She is honored to be the Magic City Poetry Festival 2022 Eco-Poetry Fellow.
Anna Qu
Qu is a Chinese American writer. Her critically acclaimed debut memoir, Made In China: A Memoir of Love and Labor, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, and Kweli Journal, among others. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at New England College and Monmouth University. She’s currently working on a novel and collection of essays.
Rasikh was born in July 1998 in Afghanistan. Historical accounts, literature, mythology, and folktales inspired her at an early age. Her first work was inspired by the colonial settlements of 1600s America. She authored a fantastical trilogy, Ivy Isla, accounting the adventures of a young girl in pursuit of her soul, and a fantastical comic series in Farsi called The Reign of Fire, which reintroduces long-forgotten Persian folktales in a children’s storybook. Her latest work is the translation of Akbarnama, an Afghan epic poem written in 1868 accounting the two Anglo-Afghan wars. She is working on A Little World, a novel that features the identity dilemma of a child who grows up in a post-2001 era Afghanistan where laws are suddenly liberal, but everyday social life remains highly conservative and patriarchal.
The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Carter Black Mountain Institute brings writers and the literary imagination into the heart of public life through innovative public programs, award-winning publications, and a diverse array of fellowships. BMI is part of the UNLV College of Liberal Arts, where it collaborates with distinguished graduate programs in creative writing.
