Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners of Summer Residencies

Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners of Summer Residencies

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Marina Carreira, Jung Hae Chae, Joshua Nguyen, Cy Ozgood, and JM Wong as the winners of their five summer residency scholarships. These residencies are designed to give writers time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment. 

Marina Carreira is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has work featured in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Paterson Literary Review, The Acentos Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Green Mountain Review, Hinchas de Poesia, wildness journal, and Harpoon Review. Marina has exhibited her visual art in group exhibitions and festivals at ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Hahne & Co., Gallery 211, and Living Incubator Performance Space {LIPS} in the Gateway Project Spaces in Newark, NJ. She is a founding member of Brick City Collective, a Newark-based multicultural, multimedia group working for social change through the arts. She lives in Union, NJ with her partner and kids.

Jung Hae Chae is a writer based in New Jersey. Her work has been published in AGNI, Ploughshares, Calyx Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere, as well as anthologized in the 2019 Pushcart Prize XIII: Best of the Small Presses. Most recently, she won Ploughshares‘ 2019 Emerging Writers’ Contest in nonfiction.   

Joshua Nguyen is Vietnamese-American, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in The Offing, The Acentos Review, Rambutan Literary, Button Poetry, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Hot Metal Bridge. He is currently an MFA candidate at The University of Mississippi. He is a bubble tea connoisseur and works in a kitchen.

Cy Ozgood is a queer poet and witch with a degree in text and media arts from The Evergreen State College. They are the author of several chapbooks including Girl Tramp (Horse Less Press, 2016) and Day (MOLD Editions, 2018). Their work has been featured or is forthcoming in Twang Anthology, baest journal, Gritty Silk, The Operating System, and Horse Less Review. They are a tarot reader, astrologer, farmer, educator, and a seasoned performer who has shared their poetry, music and performance art in basements, living rooms, storefronts, puppet theaters, coffee shops, repurposed churches, wineries, county fairs, riverside docks and clearings in the woods since 2011.

JM Wong (they/them) is a queer child of the Chinese diaspora living on Duwamish lands (Seattle) via Malaysia/Singapore and many cities in between. They write about movements, desire, and longings across distances and bordered spaces. Of diaspora, of the logistical supply chain stretching over ocean waters, of connections transcending prison walls, of crossings over to the ancestral realms. What we each journey through matters, and the futures we imagine begin from now. 

Finalists for this year’s fellowships were Bailey Moorhead, Stacey Balkun, Rachel Holbrook, Kathry Leland, Stephen Hundley, Mary Leauna Christensen, Sabrina Sarro, Maya Williams, and Heather Leigh Maher.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is now accepting applications for our fall writers residencies. Find out more at our website.