2023 Emerging Voices Fellows and Mentors

Tanaïs is the author of In Sensorium, winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the critically acclaimed novel Bright Lines, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. An independent perfumer, their fragrance, beauty and design studio TANAÏS is based in New York City. Tanaïs will mentor Vera Blossom.

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 LA 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. Deesha will mentor Lindsay Ferguson.

Alechia Dow is a former pastry chef, librarian, and author of YA scifi-fantasies: The Sound of Stars (a Junior Library Guild Selection and Hal Clement ALA notable), The Kindred (Indie Next Kids Jan 2022 Pick, Locus Finalist, Bank Street College's Best Children's Book of 2023), A Song of Salvation, All's Fair(y) in Love & War (2025), several short anthology pieces, and middle grade stories Just a Pinch of Magic and The Cookie Crumbles which she co-authored with Tracy Badua. When not writing, you can find her having epic dance parties with her daughter, baking, reading, taking teeny adventures, and exploring her local food scene. Alechia will mentor Joy McKinley.

Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. They have been featured in various outlets such as TIME, NPR, Teen Vogue and the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. Their first book of poems If They Come For Us explored themes of orphaning, family, the violence of the 1947 Partition of South Asia, the legacy of colonization, borders, shifting identity, and violence. Their debut novel, When We Were Sisters, from One World/Random House, was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Carol Shield’s Prize. Along with Safia Elhillo they co-edited an anthology for Muslim people who are also women, trans, gender non-conforming, and/ or queer, Halal If You Hear Me, which was built around the radical idea that there are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslim people in the world. They are the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendship among women of color that was in a development deal with HBO, and wrote and directed Got Game, a short film that follows a queer South Asian Muslim woman trying to navigate a kink party after being single, and wrote, directed and starred in Retrieval, a lyrical short film that follows the process of a soul retrieval in the aftermath of sexual assault. They are also a writer and co-producer on Ms. Marvel on Disney +, and wrote Episode 5, “Time and Again.” Fatimah will mentor Jassmine Parks.

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.” Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner US and Picador UK, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that is a bold poetic reckoning with the realities of class and race and their intergenerational effects.

For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew Fellowship as well as the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Ireland, New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, American Poet, The Rumpus, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an M.F.A. from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an M.P.A. from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an associate professor and co-chairs the Creative Writing Department at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award. Airea will mentor Arianne Elena Payne.

Lillian Li is the author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was an NPR Best Book of 2018, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, One Story, Bon Appetit, and Travel & Leisure. Lillian will mentor Zen Ren.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Hailed as “original, politically daring, and passionately written” by  Vogue, her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree earned the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, an Indie Next Pick, and a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection.  

Her debut memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a National Book Award Finalist in Nonfiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by  TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, and Boston Globe, among others. Rojas Contreras brings readers into her childhood, where her grandfather, Nono, was a renowned community healer gifted with “the secrets”: powers that included talking to the dead, fortunetelling, treating the sick, and moving the clouds. The Man Who Could Move Clouds interweaves enchanting family lore, Colombian history, and a reckoning with the bounds of reality. 

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. She has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, the Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. Rojas Contreras is a Visiting Writer at the University of San Francisco. Ingrid will mentor Denise Rhone.

Meng Jin is the author of the novel Little Gods (Custom House, 2020), and the story collection, Self-Portrait with Ghost (Mariner Books, 2022). A Kundiman fellow, her books have been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner, LA Times First Fiction Prize, NYPL Young Lions Award, and other honors, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prizes and Best American Short Stories. Meng will mentor Kristen Shim.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, winner of the Ken Kesey 2016 Oregon Book Award in fiction, Dora: A Headcase, Verge, a collection of short fictions, and Allegories of Violence, a critical book on war and narrative. Her widely acclaimed experimental memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for the PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA and Oregon Book Award; the memoir is currently being adapted for film by Kristen Stewart. The Misfit's Manifesto is a collaborative book based on her TED Talk On the Beauty of Being a Misfit (with over 4 million views). She is the founder of Corporeal Writing in Oregon. She is a very good swimmer. Lidia will mentor Layli Shirani.

Jasmine Mans is a Black poet and performance artist from Newark, New Jersey. Jasmine’s poetry book, BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME (Penguin Random House) has been named one of Oprah’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books and a TIME Magazine Must Read, to name a few; and Jasmine herself named as Essence’s #1 Contemporary Black Poet To Know. 

Jasmine most recently collaborated with the Brooklyn Ballet on an original performance piece titled “Unnatural Surrounding” at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music. Prior to this, she opened for Nikole Hannah-Jones at the launch of The 1619 Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and co-hosted The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America digital series alongside renowned writer, Jason Reynolds. 

Jasmine’s poetry has gone viral many times on YouTube. Jasmine is a MUSE100 icon and can currently be heard as the voice of Ulta Beauty’s national “Muse” campaign, honoring Black women in the hair and beauty industry. She has opened packed shows for Mos Def, Janelle Monae, and Goapele, and performed at such esteemed venues as the Kennedy Center, Broadway's New Amsterdam Theater, the Wisconsin Governor’s Mansion, and the Sundance Film Festival. Mans also participated in Brave New Voices, an 8-episode poetry documentary on HBO. Jasmine will mentor D’mani Thomas.

Lisa Ko is the author of the nationally best-selling novel The Leavers, which was a 2017 National Book Award for Fiction finalist, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Her second novel, Memory Piece, will be published in spring 2024 by Riverhead Books. Lisa will mentor JJ Xiao.

Anelise Chen was born in Taipei, and moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1990. She earned her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. from New York University. She is now Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she also teaches fiction. Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Awardee. Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications such as The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Believer Magazine, BOMB, and The New Republic. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Centre, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She is currently at work on another book, Clam Down (One World Random House), based on her mollusk column for the Paris Review. She lives in New Haven with her family. Anelise will mentor Lucy Zhou.