The PEN Ten: An Interview with the 2021 Emerging Voices Fellows

The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, PEN America’s 2021 Emerging Voices Fellows, hailing from eight states across the country, provide insight into their creative processes, how they’ve developed as artists and writers, and what inspires their literary practice. PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship provides a five-month immersive mentorship program for early-career writers from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in the publishing world. The fellowship nurtures creative community, provides professional development training, and demystifies the path to publication—with the ultimate goal of diversifying the publishing and media industries. Learn more about this year’s fellows »

1. Where was your favorite place to read as a child? Why?
JENISE MILLER: My favorite place to read as a child was inside. Maybe there’s a metaphor here, but inside meant some mostly quiet space in the apartment or house or motel or duplex we lived in at the time. Sometimes that was my room, when I had my own, or the living room when I shared a room with family, or the bathroom, when almost every other space was occupied.

As a teen, I caught the Metro bus and train to school, to work, to the Long Beach Public Library in one direction, the Los Angeles Central Library in the other, and the train became my favorite place to read. I loved reading in the sunlight that flooded through the windows, views of different neighborhoods as background, the close yet distant presence of people, similar to those inside home spaces. I cherish the places I found to read and even more the places I’ve found through reading.

2. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you? Why?
NEFERTITI ASANTI: Growing up, my mommy was a teacher. She worked in special education and focused on early childhood education, so I grew up with lots of children’s books in our home. I distinctly remember Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold for the way Harlem came alive through narrative and visuals that felt both familiar and dreamy to me. Several Bill Martin Jr. books, including I Am Freedom’s Child and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom were also my favorites because of the rhythmic elements.

But a piece of writing that had a profound impact on me was Langston Hughes’s “My People.” My mother wrote the poem out on a huge piece of tablet paper and posted it up on my bedroom door. Several nights before bed, she encouraged me to read the poem out loud. Filling my little body with those affirmations in the sound of my own voice allowed me to embrace a feeling of agency when it came to words and writing and being unapologetic about taking up space with the sound of my voice. I had to be younger than six, and I think it was my first real lesson in embodying poetry.

“Truth primarily depends on the body’s positioning within the world—a series of assumptions made based on our own experiences. Which is why a person is able to say, ‘This is my truth,’ revealing its pliability. I find that my best work comes when I keep the subjectivity of truth in mind. I believe it makes for a more nuanced result, much like the world itself.”
—Rochelle Marrett

3. How does your writing navigate truth? What is the relationship between truth and fiction?
ROCHELLE MARRETT: The success of fiction relies on the reader’s perception of its plausibility, so in that way it needs to ring true, regardless of content. For me, the allure of fiction writing is the chance to disrupt preconceived notions, challenging perceptions of what is true. More often than not, a piece begins to form when I find myself responding viscerally to an event and then needing to make sense of what has happened. I’m always curious about what I think and why. And I pose similar questions to the people around me.

I’m concerned with the various expressions of self, and the more I consider this, the less objective truth seems to be. Truth primarily depends on the body’s positioning within the world—a series of assumptions made based on our own experiences. Which is why a person is able to say, “This is my truth,” revealing its pliability. I find that my best work comes when I keep the subjectivity of truth in mind. I believe it makes for a more nuanced result, much like the world itself.

4. Why do you think people need stories?
OFELIA MONTELONGO: People need stories for different reasons. Perhaps to find the meaning of life or maybe to explore other ideas and worlds. Perhaps to escape from our ordinary lives. To understand our ordinary lives. To find our place in the world. To find our identities. To be happy.

Personally, I don’t know how to exist without them. I grew up in a house full of books and stories around me. For me, stories are a wonderful reason to live.

5. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
KB: Probably in the seventh grade when my teacher was reading a classmate’s poem that dealt with ghosts and vampires; the premise was a boy who didn’t call her back. I was struck by that for the rest of the day, and it was the first poem I’d ever heard. In a way, I feel like I’m chasing that high every time I read or write a poem.

“People need stories for different reasons. Perhaps to find the meaning of life or maybe to explore other ideas and worlds. Perhaps to escape from our ordinary lives. To understand our ordinary lives. To find our place in the world. To find our identities. To be happy.”
—Ofelia Montelongo

6. What is your relationship to place and story? Are there specific places you keep going back to in your writing?
JERAKAH GREENE: In my writing, place is a character, and that place is usually Tulsa. Tulsa is my hometown, my muse. I feel compelled to write about this city’s complicated history and my complicated relationship to it. Something about the cracked pavement and the redbud trees feels so literary. Really, this place just begs to be written about.

7. Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to meet? What would you like to discuss?
KIMBERLY NGUYEN: Marina Tsvetaeva. One of my most difficult assignments in college was to memorize and recite her poem, “Рас-стояние: версты, мили…,” for my introductory Russian course. At the time I did the assignment, the words were just sounds in a language I didn’t understand yet, but four years later as a Russian major when I revisited her poem and could recognize her mastery of the Russian language, I was able to feel the full range of the pain she so viscerally illustrates. I just want to hear her read her own poem, to once again be moved by her.

8. What’s a piece of art (literary or not) that moves you and mobilizes your work? 
ADRIENNE OLIVER: My child; she is poetry in motion—a true believer that this life is meaningful and her existence matters. As her keeper, I know her absorption of this world, for better or worse, will mark her, and I feel called to embody and mirror back the radical joy and love she sees as possible. Indeed, nurturing and witnessing the creative child in all their expressions is life’s work for me—my work is to be a worthy ancestor. I write and live for the liberation of the most vulnerable and precious amongst us: brown girls.

“My child; she is poetry in motion—a true believer that this life is meaningful and her existence matters. As her keeper, I know her absorption of this world, for better or worse, will mark her, and I feel called to embody and mirror back the radical joy and love she sees as possible. Indeed, nurturing and witnessing the creative child in all their expressions is life’s work for me—my work is to be a worthy ancestor.”
—Adrienne Oliver

9. If you could claim any writers from the past as part of your own literary genealogy, who would your ancestors be?
TOCHUKWU OKAFOR: I grew up reading a lot of Chinua Achebe and Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I saw them as my literary ancestors, people who gave me the permission to write. But they were all men, with the exception of Enid Blyton, whose stories allowed my imaginations to soar. I wish I had come across or had been exposed to more women writers at that time.

10. What do you read (or not read) when you’re writing?
LISA LEE HERRICK: Writing is my default method of meditation, the way that my mind parses everything said and unsaid throughout my waking hours—but even my dreams (when I have them) aren’t spared from perpetual inquiry, examination, and reconfiguration of events. I keep paper within reach everywhere I go: notepads by the bed, in my purse, grocery totes, the bathroom, my car—napkins, in a pinch. Although I do the most reading (by volume) while researching and planning a new piece, whether an essay, short story, comic, or chapter—indulging every whim and fleeting fancy without genre snobbery—I always return to my handwritten notes to steward my own original work. That, and notes from my editors. What I don’t read while writing/revising drafts is anything on social media, viral or not.

11. What’s something about your writing habits that has changed over time?
LILLY U. NGUYEN: When I first began to write, it felt like something to accomplish. I have realized only very recently that it is the living that is the important thing. Therefore, I write insofar that it allows me to live better. What this means is that writing exists as a habit in my life, like brushing my teeth or taking a shit. It is no more important than these other things. I can’t write for more than two hours at a time, then I’m done and continue to live the rest of my life.

“There are occasions when language threatens to erase what I really hope to say. Writing is full of mysteries and contradictions like this, which can be frustrating, but it’s a wonderful kind of frustration if I allow myself to question everything again, including the legitimacy of writing, and accept that I am not entitled to an answer.”
—Stephan Sebastian Herrera

12. How does your identity shape your writing? Is there such a thing as “the writer’s identity?”
SHANDA MCMANUS: Identity has two sides. For me, there is an outer identity of what I am to others: a Black woman, physician, wife, mother, and other appellations. However, I also have an inner essence made up of layers of experience, personal history, and core beliefs. Both identities inform my work and create the lens through which others access my art. And so, I believe each writer has a unique identity consisting of who they know themselves to be and who the person others see.

13. What is a moment of frustration that you’ve encountered in the writing process, and how did you overcome it?
STEPHAN SEBASTIAN HERRERA: There are occasions when language threatens to erase what I really hope to say. Writing is full of mysteries and contradictions like this, which can be frustrating, but it’s a wonderful kind of frustration if I allow myself to question everything again, including the legitimacy of writing, and accept that I am not entitled to an answer. Marguerite Duras said that just like writers, we write every day for the first time. There is no antidote. There is only the joy of not knowing, and writing is the best way I can think to celebrate.

14. What does your creative process look like? How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired?
JOANNA HONG: It’s always a mix of films, books, music, and walking. Different languages. I’ll read or watch something, then go for a long walk on my own while listening to music. I’m not sure if this is because I grew up playing the cello, but classical music has the most power to ground or transport my mind.

Nefertiti Asanti (they/she) is a poet born and raised in the Bronx and a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, EmergeNYC, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Nefertiti’s forthcoming chapbook fist of wind won the inaugural Start a Riot! Chapbook Prize sponsored by Still Here San Francisco, RADAR Productions, and Foglifter. Nefertiti currently serves as prose poetry editor of Stellium Literary Magazine. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

KB (they/them) is a Black queer nonbinary miracle. They are the author of the chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, winner of the 2020 Saguaro Poetry Prize. Follow them online at @earthtokb. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Jerakah Greene (they/them) is a fiction writer whose work explores queerness, gender identity, and their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jerakah’s writing has been published in Hair Trigger, Crabfat Magazine, Impossible Archetype, and the Lab Review. In 2019, they were twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Stephan Sebastian Herrera (he/him) is an Ecuadorian-American writer. His fiction has appeared in Latino Book Review and The Acentos Review, and he was a 2020 finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. He is originally from Arizona and now lives in Brooklyn. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Lisa Lee Herrick (she/her) is an award-winning Hmong-American writer, illustrator, and media producer based in California. She is the co-founder of the LitHop literary festival, editor at large for Hyphen magazine, serves in a media advising capacity for several nonprofit organizations, and is currently working on her first memoir—a collection of personal essays—and a graphic novel. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Joanna Hong (she/her) is a writer and translator. Originally from Los Angeles, she has lived in Europe for nearly a decade and she speaks Korean, German, Italian, French, and Spanish. Her work can be found on Dazed & Confused, Newsweek, The Guardian, and other outlets. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Lilly U. Nguyen (she/her) is a writer based in San Diego, CA. She earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her PhD from UCLA, where she specialized in feminist science and technology studies. She is a former recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and recently was awarded a Tin House Summer Residency. She is preparing a book of essays, tentatively titled This Wound I Give You Is a Gift. The book considers the questions of war, inheritance, obligation, and the refugee self. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Kimberly Nguyen (she/her) is a Vietnamese-American poet originally from Omaha, NE but currently living in New York City. She is a recent graduate of Vassar College, where she was a recipient of a Beatrice Daw Brown Prize for poetry. Her work can be found in diaCRITICS, perhappened mag, Hobart, Muzzle Magazine, and others. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Rochelle Marrett (she/her) is a Jamaican writer whose work seeks, at once, to be both an ode to her country and a critical examination of certain socio-political sentiments. Her writing also strives to articulate the everyday complexities of Black immigrant life in a manner that is a compelling and unsettling disruption of long-held assumptions. Most recently, Rochelle has been longlisted for the 2021 Disquiet Fiction Prize and a 2019 recipient of the Room Project Fellowship. Rochelle holds a BA in English from The College of Wooster. Currently she resides in Michigan with her husband and daughter. She is at work on her first novel. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Shanda McManus (she/her) is a physician writer. She has practiced family medicine for over twenty years. Her writing has been featured or forthcoming in Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Midnight & Indigo, and Bellevue Literary Review. Shanda lives in New Jersey with her husband and their five children. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Jenise Miller (she/her) is a Black Panamanian writer, poet, and urban planner based in Compton. Her writing about art, local history, and growing up Black Latinx in Compton and Los Angeles is featured in her poetry chapbook, The Blvd, as well as in the Los Angeles Times, LA Review of Books, KCET Artbound, Boom California, Dryland Literary Journal, and The Acentos Review. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Ofelia Montelongo (she/her) is a bilingual writer from Mexico. She received a BA in accounting and finance, an MBA, and a BA in English and creative writing. She has a MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Maryland. Her work has been published in Latino Book Review, The Acentos Review, Rio Grande Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at the University of Maryland and is a PEN/Faulkner writer in residence in Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Tochukwu Okafor (he/him) is a Nigerian writer whose work has appeared in the 2019 Best Small Fictions, the 2018 Best of the Net, and elsewhere. In 2021, he received fellowships from the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, Jack Straw Writers Program, GrubStreet, and the Worcester Arts Council. He is a 2022 Good Hart Artist-in-Residence, a 2021 Frank Conley Memorial Scholar, a 2021 Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholar for Young Writers, an alumnus of the 2021 Tin House Workshop, and a 2018 Rhodes Scholar finalist. He lives in Worcester, MA, and is at work on a novel and a story collection. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Adrienne Oliver (she/her) is a performer + public educator + single mother, and a Black woman in each of those realities; her work is to become a worthy ancestor. Adrienne’s multi-genre experimental works encircle the performance of woman and motherhood, weaving the magical and mundane. Her work has appeared in the Virginia Film Festival, Spark + Echo Arts, Puerto del Sol Black Voices, Live Arts Theater, and the McGuffey Art Center, where she is currently an artist-in-residence. Adrienne curates and hosts the Coco Sprinkler Citrus Poem reading series and Jericho Brown calls her “the only person who reads [his] poems better than [him].” She lives in Charlottesville, VA with her daughter, Pearl. Photo Credit: Adrienne Oliver