The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Tia Clark and Sarah Fonseca as the winners of the VIDA fellowships for fall 2021 residencies. Thank you again to Tatiana Johnson-Boria who served as this year’s VIDA fellowship judge.
Congratulations also to Tochukwu Okafor, Remi Recchia, and L. Renée who were also awarded grants and/or fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Tia Clark’s work has appeared in Joyland, The Offing, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, No Tokens, and elsewhere. They have received support and fellowships from the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A New Yorker, they currently live and teach in New Orleans.
Sarah Fonseca is a self-taught writer from the Georgia foothills who lives in New York City. Her fiction and cinema writing have appeared in Bosie Magazine, Evergreen Review, Leste Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Museum of the Moving Image’s Reverse Shot, and others. She is a co-editor of The New Lesbian Pulp (Feminist Press, 2023).
Tochukwu Okafor 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 PEN America, 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, and a 2018 Rhodes Scholar finalist. [Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan]
Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. student in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi’s first full-length poetry collection, Quicksand/Stargazing, is forthcoming from Cooper Dillon Books in 2021.
L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. A third-year MFA candidate at Indiana University, she has served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, has been published in Tin House Online, Appalachian Review, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, New Limestone Review, and elsewhere.
Finalists for this fall’s fellowships included Cindy Ok, Katherine Gaffney, Leon Ozuna, Astha Cupta, and Monica Teresa Ortiz.
