The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) is pleased to announce its literary fellows for the 2023-24 season.
Edgar Gomez, Tajja Isen, Julián Delgado Lopera, and Morgan Thomas are this year’s Shearing Fellows. Each year, BMI supports four writers who have published at least one book by a trade or literary press to live and work in Las Vegas and serve as fellows. These fellows 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 retired Nevada Supreme Court Chief Justice Miriam Shearing.
“BMI is thrilled to welcome this cohort of Shearing Fellows in 2023-2024,” said Colette LaBouff, executive director at BMI. “Beyond their individual accomplishments, their publications and their books in progress, what strikes me most about this group is their commitment to and their real interest in engaging the university and wider Las Vegas communities. We’re eager to welcome them here and spend time with these amazing writers.”
Shearing Fellows – Fall 2023
Edgar Gomez is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, their words have appeared in
Poets & Writers,
Narratively,
Catapult,
Lithub,
The Rumpus, and elsewhere online and in print. Their memoir,
High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by the
New York Times, named a Best Book of 2022 by Publisher’s Weekly, Buzzfeed, and Electric Literature, and received a 2023 Stonewall Honor Award. Their second book, a memoir about money, Florida, and surviving under capitalism titled,
Alligator Tears, will be out in 2025 from Crown.
Morgan Thomas is a writer from the Gulf Coast. Their debut story collection,
MANYWHERE, was published by MCD-FSG and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Lambda Literary’s Transgender Fiction Prize, the
LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Their work has appeared in
The Atlantic,
American Short Fiction,
The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Shearing Fellows – Spring 2024
Tajja Isen is the author of
Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service, named a Best Book of the Year by Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and Daily Hive. As an editor, she has worked at Catapult and The Walrus, and she is co-editor of the essay anthology,
The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. She has written for
The Atlantic,
Vulture,
Time, and
Longreads, among other outlets. Her next book is a memoir on mentorship and ambition.
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of the
New York Times-acclaimed novel
Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press, 2020), the Winner of the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; and a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Other books include
Quiéreme (Nomadic Press, 2017) and
¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute, 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants, which was the 2018 winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Independent Publisher Book Award. Lopera has received fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, Headlands Center for The Arts, and Lambda Literary Foundation, among others. The former executive director of RADAR Productions and a founder of Drag Queen Story Hour, Lopera was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and lives in San Francisco.
About Black Mountain Institute
Black Mountain Institute, housed in the UNLV College of Liberal Arts, champions writers and storytellers through programs, fellowships and community engagement. From the brightest spot on the planet, Black Mountain Institute amplifies writing and artistic expression to connect us to each other in the Las Vegas Valley, the Southwest, and beyond. For more information about BMI, please visit the BMI website.
