The Poetry Coalition Presents 2020-2021 Fellows

The Poetry Coalition, a network of 25+ poetry organizations, is presenting its inaugural cohort of the Poetry Coalition Fellowship program. These five individuals have been selected to receive paid fellowships, each at a different host organization within the Poetry Coalition: CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Mizna, and Split This Rock. The fellows will work part-time over the course of a forty-week period beginning September 15, 2020. The fellows will also receive professional development opportunities.

This three-year pilot program will offer paid fellowship positions to five fellows per year, or a total of fifteen fellows, from 2020 through 2023. In consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the current positions will be remote.

The 2020-2021 Poetry Coalition fellows are:

At CantoMundo, María Fernanda

María Fernanda is a poet who builds creative residencies with and for artists across disciplines. She has managed national North American tour contracts with artists and orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Mavis Staples, and numerous International Artists. She has held positions at The Shed, THE REACH at The John F. Kennedy Center, and ASU Gammage. Her poems and translations appear in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, The Wide Shore, Soul Sister Revue, and elsewhere. Featuring at The Brooklyn Museum, The Kelly Writers House, The Ecuadorian American Cultural Center, The Phoenix Museum, and more, Fernanda has received fellowships from Callaloo Writers Workshop, VONA/Voices of Our Nation, and CantoMundo. She is a Black Ecuadorian American from Washington, DC with a cultural background branching to Louisiana and Texas.

At Cave Canem, Christopher J. Greggs

Christopher J. Greggs is a poet, designer, and recording artist living in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a Cave Canem, Tin House, Callaloo, and Watering Hole Poetry fellow, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Winter Tangerine, Texas Review, and This Is What America Looks Like (Washington Writers' Publishing House), among other publications. Christopher earned his MFA in Poetry from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. His debut EP, Change Mah Name, is streaming on all platforms. His interview with actor/director Sonja Sohn can be found in the great weather for MEDIA's anthology Suitcase of Chrysanthemums.

At Kundiman, Steven Duong

Steven Duong is a Vietnamese American writer and artist from San Diego. His poems have appeared in The Margins, The Massachusetts Review, AGNI, Passages North, Pleiades, and elsewhere. As a 2019 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, he traveled to Malawi, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, conducting his global writing project, "Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of Containment." A 2020 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry for The Adroit Journal, he currently serves as a guest editor at Palette Poetry.

At Mizna, Ruba El Melik

Ruba El Melik is an independent researcher, curator, and cultural worker interested in shaping futures for cultural expression and creating possibilities for African scholarship on the continents that exist outside of institutions. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from UCLA and is currently a Researcher with Andariya, an East African media platform, where she studies the impact of art suppression and erasure on collective memory and social ideologies amongst the Sudanese population. She is also co-host and co-curator of In The Margins, a transnational literary collective that hosts live bi-monthly virtual discussions centering radical thought and marginalized authors. She is based between Rochester, MN and Khartoum, Sudan.

At Split This Rock, Destiny Hemphill

A poet, healer, and organizer, Destiny Hemphill is a Black daughter of the U.S. South with nearly a decade of experience in co-creating spaces devoted to poetry, communion, and transformation. She has received fellowships from Tin House, Callaloo, and Naropa University. Destiny is the author of the chapbook Oracle: a Cosmology (2018). Her work can also be found in Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, EcoTheo, The Wanderer, and elsewhere. She offers her poems as chants and rites to the sacred art of Black liberation.

The goals of the Poetry Coalition Fellowship program are:

to help diversify the leadership of the nonprofit literary field by encouraging more inclusion of individuals from under-represented communities;

to develop future literary leaders regardless of educational background;

to introduce the individuals who are interested to nonprofit literary arts management, fundraising, programming, and editorial work, providing experiences that will be useful as they seek jobs and inspiring them to consider working in the literary field; and to increase the capacity of each host organization by having additional assistance.