The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Cleo Qian, Luopu Malakpa, Siew David Hii, Mary Leauna Christensen, and Gustavo Barahona-Lopez as the recipients of our Summer 2022 Residency Fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Cleo Qian is a writer from California. She is a graduate of the NYU MFA program in fiction; her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Pleiades, Shenandoah, The Guardian Long Read, Witness, The Common, and several other outlets.
Luopu (Low-Pooh) Malakpa is Liberian American. She enjoys traveling and eating. She loves writing because it allows her to create space for herself in a world that hasn’t always created space for her. She sees her art as a form of activism and a way for her to practice radical self-love/self-care.
Siew David Hii studies creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he is an MFA candidate. His prose appears or is forthcoming at journals such as Story, Hobart, The Common, Sou’wester, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.
Mary Leauna Christensen (she/her), an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi. Mary is Managing Editor of The Swamp Literary Magazine. Her work can be found in New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Laurel Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly.
Gustavo Barahona-López is a writer and educator from Richmond, California. In his writing, Barahona-López draws from his experience growing up as the son of Mexican immigrants. His micro-chapbook Where Will the Children Play? was part of the Ghost City Press 2020 Summer Series. His chapbook, Loss and Other Rivers That Devour, was published in February 2022 by Nomadic Press. He was a finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West poetry prize. A member of the Writer’s Grotto and a VONA alum, Barahona-López’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, The Acentos Review, Apogee Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other publications.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships were Ava Serra, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Ally Ang, Gloria Muhammad, and Cat Wei.
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