Emerging Writer Fellowships / 2023 Mentors

Deesha Philyaw

2023 Fiction Mentor

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Philyaw is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Arthur Sze

2023 Poetry Mentor

Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. Sze has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010).

Sze is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 2012 to 2017, he was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and, in 2017, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sze’s poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His work has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Pam Houston

2023 Nonfiction Mentor

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories – Cowboys Are My Weakness (1994), which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages – and Waltzing the Cat (1999, reissued 2013), which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction; two novels, Contents May Have Shifted (2012) and Sight Hound (2006), all published by W. W. Norton & Co.; and three collections of autobiographical essays, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (2019) – from which Cheryl Strayed chose an essay for inclusion in the forthcoming Best American Travel Writing and another essay will be included in the forthcoming Pushcart Prize anthology A Rough Guide to the Heart (Virago, 2001) – and A Little More About Me (Norton, 1999, reissued 2013). Houston has also edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry (Ecco Press). She is the author of a stage play “Tracking the Pleiades” and she has written the text for Men Before Ten A.M., a book of photographs by the French photographer Veronique Vialle.

Cristina Rivera Garza

2023 Spanish Mentor

Dr. Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of six novels, three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry and three non-fiction books. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into multiple languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. The recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (Paris, 2013); as well as the Anna Seghers (Berlin, 2005), she is the only author who has won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice, in 2001 for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (translated into English by Andrew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry ) and again in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da. She has translated, from English into Spanish, Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robet Fitterman; and, from Spanish into English, “Nine Mexican Poets edited by Cristina Rivera Garza,” in New American Writing 31. She was the Breeden Eminent Scholar at Auburn University in Fall 2015 and a fellow at the UCSD Center for Humanities 2015-2016. She received a Senate Grant from UCSD and the prestigious three-year Sistema Nacional de Creadores grant from Mexico.

La imaginación pública/ Public Imagination (Conaculta Press, 2015) is her most recent published work. She has developed cross-genre collaborative projects with artists and composers in De Mirabilis Auscultationibus, Aristótles, o alguien que se hace pasar por Aristótles, cuenta de las maravillas escuchadas por casualidad acerca de Tacámbaro De Mirabilis Auscultationibus, Aristótles, o someone passing as Aristotle, tells about the marvelous things overheard about Tacámbaro], bilingual edition (Mexico: Acapulco Press, 2015), with artist Artemio Rodríguez; VIAJE – Azione Drammatica Musicale per quattro voci e quattro strumenti (Milan Italy: Sugar Music, 2014), with composer Javier Torres Maldonado; Ahí te comerán las turicatas [You will be eaten by turicatas there] (Mexico: Caja de Cerillos, 2013).

Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación, her most recent book of criticism, comparatively explores the contemporary discussions surrounding conceptualist writing in the United States, post-exoticism in France, as well as communally-based writing throughout the Americas.

She was born in Mexico (Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 1964), and has lived in the United States since 1989. She studied urban sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received her PhD in Latin American history from the University of Houston. She has written extensively on the social history of mental illness in early twentieth-century Mexico, and published academic articles in journals and edited volumes in the United States, England, Argentina and Mexico. She received a Doctorate in Humane Letters Honoris Causa from the University of Houston in 2012.