The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Ching-In Chen, recipient of the Kristi Larkin Havens Memorial Fellowship; T. Chester, recipient of the Black and/or Indigenous Identifying Writers Fellowship; as well as Caoimhe A. Harlock and Dena Igusti, winners of the Spring 2022 LGBTQIA fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic and recombinant (winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as the chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are a part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.
T. Chester (they/them) is a scholar, artist, and organizer from South Florida. Over the last 10 years, T has taught in Black Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Theatre departments at the university level. As an artist, scholar, and organizer, T centers storytelling as a way to understand difference, promote empathy, and create change. Please visit www.tabithachester.com for more information and follow them on Twitter @TJ_Da_Face.
Dena Igusti is a queer non binary Indonesian Muslim writer and multimedia artist born and raised in Queens, New York. They are the author of CUT WOMAN (Game Over Books, 2020) and I NEED THIS TO NOT SWALLOW ME ALIVE (Gingerbug Press, 2021). They have received play commissions at The Tank (First Sight, 2021) Players Theatre (SHARUM, 2019) and Center At West Park (CON DOUGH: Stories of 1-in-5 Gentrified, 2021). They are a Culture Push Associated Artist. They are currently a 2021 Playwright-in-Residence for Rogue Theater Festival. They are a 2021 Baldwin For The Arts Resident, 2021 Hook Arts Media Digital Connections Fellow, 2021 City Artist Corps, 2021 Stories Award Finalist, 2021 LMCC Governor’s Island Resident, 2021 Broadway For Racial Justice Inaugural Casting Directive Fellow, 2020 Seventh Wave Editorial Resident, 2020 Ars Nova Emerging Leaders Fellow, 2020 Spotify Sound Up cohort member, 2019 Player’s Theatre Resident Playwright, and 2018 NYC Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador. They are a Converse All Stars Artist and UN #TOGETHERBAND Global Ambassador. Their work has been featured in BOAAT Press, Peregrine Journal, and several other publications. Their work has been produced and performed at The Brooklyn Museum, The Apollo Theater, the 2018 Teen Vogue Summit, Prelude Festival (Cut Woman 2020), The Tank (First Sight 2021 at LimeFest), and several other venues internationally.
Caoimhe Harlock is a southern trans woman writer and artist. Her fiction has been published in The Evergreen Review, Gathering of the Tribes, and Superfroot Magazine, and she has comix with Honey Literary and Diskette Press (forthcoming). She’s finishing up a Ph.D. about gender and the supernatural in American literature and lives in Durham, NC with her partner, two pups, a cat, and an altar to the goddess Hecate.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships included Julia Mata, Keana Aguila Labra, Coyote Shook, Michelle Moncayo, and Annette Covrigaru.
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