’Pemi Aguda
2021 Fiction Fellow
’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria, and a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship from the Carl Brandon Society, and an Emerging Writer fellowship from Aspen Summer Words. Her novel manuscript won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award.
Gabriel Ramirez
2021 Poetry Fellow
Gabriel Ramirez is a queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist who has received fellowships from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, and CantoMundo. He has performed on Broadway in New York at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre, and other venues and universities around the nation. Ramirez’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Vibe magazine, and on Remezcla.com, as well as in Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books, 2017), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press, 2020).
Joseph Earl Thomas
2021 Nonfiction Fellow
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Northeast Philly whose work has appeared in The Offing, Gulf Coast, and Kenyon Review magazines. His writing mostly concerns the relationships between fantasy, feelings, and possibility.
The Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships are supported by The Jorge M. Peréz Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation.