Each year, UNLV's Black Mountain Institute supports two 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. Alejandro Heredia and Monica Macansantos have been selected as this year’s Shearing Fellows.
These fellows contribute to the UNLV and Las Vegas arts community through readings, workshops, and other public programming.
Beginning in the 2024-25 academic year, BMI’s Shearing Fellows will serve full academic year terms, allowing for the development of deeper connections to Las Vegas and Southern Nevada.
Maryam Ala Amjadi, BMI’s City of Asylum Fellow since 2023, will continue her fellowship for a second year through spring 2025.
BMI’s City of Asylum fellowship program offers refuge and community to writers escaping political persecution in their home countries. Over the years, fellows have arrived in Las Vegas from Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, China, and Sierra Leone.
2024-25 Shearing Fellows
Alejandro Heredia is a queer Afro-Dominican writer, educator, and community organizer from The Bronx.
His debut novel, Loca, will be published by Simon and Schuster Spring 2025. He has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, and CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.
His work has been featured in Teen Vogue, The Offing, LitHub, and elsewhere. Heredia received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.
Monica Macansantos holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. from the International Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington.
She is the author of the forthcoming essay collection, Returning to My Father's Kitchen, and the story collection, Love and Other Rituals.
Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2016. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and others.
2024-25 City of Asylum Fellow
Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian poet, translator, and researcher. She is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, and the translator of a selection of Raymond Carver’s poems into Persian. Her recent book, Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems), was published by Poetrywala in November 2022.
Ala Amjadi received the "Young Generation Poet" Prize in the first Yinchuan International Poetry Festival, China (2011), and was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (2008). She has worked as a translator at the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) and was previously a writer Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page dedicated to Iranian culture and society.
In 2017, she earned a joint Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies as an Erasmus Mundus fellow from Kent (UK) and Porto (Portugal) universities. Ala Amjadi’s poems and translations of contemporary Iranian poets have been anthologized internationally and appeared in publications such as Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, Weeping Willow Books, and The Mongrel Book of Voices. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Albanian, Chinese, Hindi, Italian, Kannada, Marathi, Romanian, and Spanish.
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 website.
