2024 Emerging Voices Fellows

POETRY
San Diego, CA

Cyrana Martin is a recreational estrogen user and poet from San Diego, CA. Work by Cyrana has appeared in Polyester Zine and Lavender Review.

CREATIVE NONFICTION
Pronouns: they/them

Gabb Schivone is a writer and investigative journalist.

FICTION
CA
Pronouns: she/her

Jemila Pratt is a high school English teacher in Los Angeles. She serves as a tireless advocate for mental wellness and feels grateful seeing former students off to college and beyond. A perpetual student, Jemila is often reading and working on a draft, while swearing off the evils of television (unless it's YouTube at dinner time). Writing has been a consistent part of her life, which Jemila uses to share good, horrible, and comical life experiences with anyone brave enough to listen. For balance and health, she takes Peloton classes weekly, enjoys crafting greeting cards, and creating DIY beauty & hair products. Born in Ohio and raised in Pasadena, California, Jemila maintains the reserved shy girl with glasses persona - until it's time to dance.

CREATIVE NONFICTION
PA
Pronouns: he/him

Kou B. Thao is a queer, Hmong-American child of refugees. His life's work has been fighting for racial, social and queer justice across sectors. He writes to transmute trauma into healing. Kou is a 2017 Aspen Institute Ideas Festival Fellow, a 2021 Loft Literary Creative Nonfiction Fellow  and a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow.

He is currently working on his memoir: the story of a queer, Hmong-American cosmic shaman who retraces the wounds of war on his quest to unlock the secret to healing generations of trauma. Find him meditating, swimming or hugging a tree.

IG: @CosmicKou.

POETRY
Panama City, Panama
Pronouns: she/her

Magdalena Arias Vásquez is a writer and translator. Her poems have been published in AGNI and Jet Fuel Review and recognized in Fugue Journal's 2023 Poetry Contest and the Bullock Poetry Prize with the Academy of American Poets. Magdalena was an AWP Season 20 Poetry Mentee. She writes in both Spanish and English and earned her BA from Williams College in 2023. Originally from Panama City, Panama, she currently lives in New York.

CREATIVE NONFICTION
Juneau, AK
Pronouns: she/her

Na Mee is a Kundiman fellow and three-time Rasmuson Foundation Award recipient. She is grateful to have received additional support from The Aspen Institute, The Loft Literary

Center, Storyknife, and Hedgebrook (2024). Her work has been published in such places as AGNI, Lit Hub, Feminist Review, Washington Square Review, and The Rumpus. Her

work received an Alaska Literary Awards and an Honorable Mention for the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes prize. She lives on Lingít Aaní (aka Juneau, Alaska) where she is raising a hilarious teenage son and a pack of sweet animals.

POETRY
San Francisco, CA
Pronouns: she/her

Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. She was a 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize Poetry Finalist and a 2023 Moloka‘i Arts Center Artist in Residence. She has received support from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her work has been published in Epiphany, swamp pink, Reed Magazine, and Pleiades, and she has contributed to The Rumpus and SOMA Magazine.

FICTION
Pronouns: she/her

S. Bec has worked as an editor for a variety of nonfiction publications. She is writing her first novel and was accepted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate summer session in May.

FICTION
Belmont, NC
Pronouns: she/her

Born, raised, and living in North Carolina, Sidney Logan Echevarria is a graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She enjoys researching family histories and weaving stories from the threads of her past. Sidney is currently working on her first novel.

POETRY
Plymouth, MA
Pronouns: she/her

Tzynya Pinchback is a disabled mermaid, writing about the Black woman's body in nature, in illness, and in joy as a deliberate act. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from The Cordial Eye Gallery & Artist Space, Roots.Wounds.Words, and VONA, and she was a finalist for Plymouth Poet Laureate in 2020. Her work appears in various print and online publications, and her chapbook, “How to make pink confetti”, was selected for the 2021 Dancing Girl Press reading series for women poets. She is a full-time technical writer, and advocates for health equity as an appointed member of the Town of Plymouth Commission on Disabilities, and DPAC Champion Corps.