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2025 Emerging Voices Fellows and Mentors

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2025 Emerging Voices Fellows and Mentors

PEN America welcomes the 2025 Emerging Voices Fellows. Trini Bui, Danielle Shandiin Emerson, Leila Farjami, Elisabeth Vasquez Hein, Varun U. Shetty, Pegah Ouji, Ava Pauline Emilione, Emily del Carmen Ramirez, and Solomon Tesfaye will each receive $1,500, a professional headshot, one-year complimentary PEN America membership, and partake in a five-month immersive mentorship program that includes virtually accessible creative writing workshops, visits from publishing professionals and established writers, and workshops that emphasize the business of books. This year’s mentors include: Ashna Ali, Kenzie Allen, Remica Bingham-Risher, Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Tajja Isen, Chinelo Okparanta, Cherry Lou Sy, Nafkote Tamirat, and Swati Teerdhala.

For the fourth consecutive application cycle the 9 fellows were selected from a record high applicant pool. The final selection committee included Matt Ortile, author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name, Esther Lin, author of the poetry collections Cold Thief Place and The Ghost Wife, and Eskor David Johnson, author of the novel, Pay As You Go.

The following talented writers were 2025 finalists: Michael Battle, M.A. Chavez, Kat Chua, Jazelle Jajeh, Leilani Lamb, Arnold Mata, & Z. Yasmin Waheed.

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Fellow

Ava Pauline Emilione, New Jersey
FICTION

Ava Pauline Emilione (they/them) is a Brooklyn-born writer and editor. They write about culture and identity through a decolonial, queer, and sometimes surreal lens. They are the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ebony Tomatoes Collective, a literary and arts magazine centering Black writers.

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Mentor

Chinelo Okparanta is the author of Happiness, Like Water, Under the Udala Trees, and most recently, Harry Sylvester Bird. Her honors include two Lambda Literary Awards, an O. Henry Prize and finalist selections for the International DUBLIN Literary Award, the NAACP Image Award in Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in Literature, among others. She has been long listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2017, Okparanta was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2018 she served as a fiction judge for the U.S. National Book Awards.

Fellow

Danielle Shandiin Emerson (Connecticut)
POETRY

Danielle Shandiin Emerson (she/her) is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). Her maternal grandfather is Ashííhí (Salt People Clan) and her paternal grandfather is Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. She has received support from GrubStreet, Lambda Literary, The Diné Artisan + Author Capacity Building Institute, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Highlights Foundation, and Sundress Publications. She has work published and/or forthcoming from swamp pink, Poets.org, Yellow Medicine Review, Thin Air Magazine, The Chapter House Journal, and others. Her writing centers healing, kinship, language-learning, and family.

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Mentor

Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, she is the recipient of a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, a 92NY Discovery Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award in poetry. Her work can be found in POETRY, Boston Review, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other venues. She is a first generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin

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Fellow

Elisabeth Vasquez Hein (Washington)
CREATIVE NONFICTION

Elisabeth Vasquez Hein (she/her) is a Filipina American writer and photographic artist based in Seattle. Daughter of an immigrant, mother of a mixed-race child, and influenced by her upbringing in disparate geographies, Elisabeth’s work explores migration, in-betweenness, and belonging. Her writing is featured in CRAFT, the Pinch, Bellingham Review,Silk Road Review, and Both/And: A Mixed-Race Manifesto (Beacon Press, 2026).

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Mentor

Tajja Isen is the author of the essay collection SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS and the forthcoming memoir TOUGH LOVE.

Fellow

Emily del Carmen Ramirez (New York)
FICTION

Emily del Carmen Ramirez (she/her) is a queer Dominican American writer born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores themes of identity, familial tension, and cultural folklore. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

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Mentor

Cherry Lou Sy is a writer and playwright originally from the Philippines currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College. Cherry is also a teacher with PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud. She has received fellowships and residencies from VONA, Tin House, and elsewhere. Love Can’t Feed You is her debut novel.

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Fellow

Leila Farjami (California)
POETRY

Leila Farjami (she/her), an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist is the recipient of The Iowa Review Award in Poetry (2025), The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in Poetry (2024), and PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship (2025). Her work has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize from Pleiades, the Perugia Press Prize, the Trio House Press Award, the SIR’s Michael Waters Poetry Prize for her book-length poetry collections. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, The Mississippi Review, The Penn Review, Southern Indiana Review, Diode, and in anthologies from Sundress and Guernica Editions, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Mentor

Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Callaloo and Essence. She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013) shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and adapted into an immersive dance and installation work by INSPIRIT Dance Company, and Starlight & Error (Diode, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award. She is an in-demand speaker at festivals, libraries, bookstores, colleges and universities and has been a featured performer at the Kennedy Center, Dodge Poetry Festival, and numerous other venues. Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up, was published by Beacon Press (2022). Her newest book, Room Swept Home, is a work of poems, historical and family photographs from Wesleyan University Press (2024) and was chosen as an Honor Poetry Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) and won the L.A. Times Book Prize. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where she resides with her husband and children.

Fellow

Pegah Ouji (Oregon)
FICTION

Pegah Ouji (she/her) is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, and Split Lip, among other publications. She has received scholarships from Kundiman, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Literary Arts, and GrubStreet. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at SmokeLong Quarterly.

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Mentor

Ayşe Papatya Bucak is the author of the collection The Trojan War Museum which was awarded the Spotlight Award by the Story Prize. Her writing has been published in a variety of journals and reprinted in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches at Florida Atlantic University.

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Fellow

Solomon Tesfaye (D.C.)
FICTION

Solomon Tesfaye (he/him) is an Ethiopian writer and management consultant based in Washington, D.C., with a background in behavioral neuroscience from Colgate University and public policy/economics from Princeton University. Born in a refugee camp in Yemen, he draws on lived experience to explore identity, faith, and what it means to be Black and immigrant across continents. His debut novel, In-Between Worlds, is a dual-timeline narrative that follows Hana, a Christian Ethiopian girl raised in a Yemeni refugee camp, who grows into a successful lawyer in the U.S. When a present-day asylum case dredges up secrets about her own past, Hana must confront buried betrayals and the price of survival—forcing her to reckon with what freedom, home, and justice really mean. Follow him at @elsoloo on Instagram or visit his website at www.elsoloo.com.

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Mentor

Nafkote Tamirat is the author of the novel The Parking Lot Attendant (Henry Holt, March 2018). She has written about 90s movies for The Paris Review and was a contributor to the interactive fiction series “Daughter, First”, a collaboration between Glamour and Lenny Letter.

Nafkote is a graduate of Yale and Columbia University and has worked as a teacher, a horoscope writer, a tour guide and a translator. She now lives in Paris.

Fellow

Trini Bui (Texas)
FICTION

Trini Bui (she/her) is a high school English teacher living in Fort Worth, TX. Between grading essays and going to dive bars for karaoke, Trini finds time to write about identity, memory, and belonging. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and taught English as a language for a year in Huế, Việt Nam, as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant.

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Mentor

Swati Teerdhala is the author of Maya in Multicolor, The Boyfriend Wish and The Tiger At Midnight trilogy. She’s passionate about many things, including how to make a proper cup of tea, the right ratio of curd-to-crust in a lemon tart, and diverse representation in the stories we tell. She currently lives in New York City.

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Fellow

Varun U. Shetty (Ohio)
POETRY

Varun U. Shetty (he/him) is a writer and critical care physician. He grew up in Mumbai and lives in Cleveland, Ohio. His work has appeared in The Penn Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Frontier Poetry, and others. To read more of his work, visit www.varunushetty.com.

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Mentor

Ashna Ali, raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn, Ashna Ali is a queer and disabled child of the Bangladeshi diaspora, and the author of The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024) and the Substack, PAIN BABY. Their work is featured or forthcoming from The Margins, Indiana Review, Sun Dog Lit, and beyond. A Best-of-the-Net nominated poet, they are the poetry editor for Epiphany Magazine and co-editor of Dead End Zine with Hunter Hodkinson. With Divya Victor, they are the co-host of the poetry podcast The Source, produced by Asian American Writers Workshop. They hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and are earning their MFA in the low-residency Creative Writing program at Randolph College.