The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Elybeth Sofia Alcantar, Aerik Francis, and Si-Min Chong (Min) as the recipients of our Summer 2023 Residency Fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Elybeth Sofia Alcantar (she/her/they) is a 2nd year doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. Although born and raised in San Diego, California, Elybeth’s family are Indigenous Mixteco (Ñuu Savi) migrants from a Mixteco municipality in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico. As a first-generation scholar, Elybeth became committed to understanding her family’s forced displacement and migration, participation in social movements, and place-making practices in California; eventually, finding the academic discipline of Geography as a profound place to do so. Elybeth uses ethnographic methodologies, story mapping, testimonios, and photography to demonstrate the current political and ecological landscape of the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico as well as the strong community networks formed across the Western United States. Her projects have been featured in museum installations, such as Arte Américas’s exhibit, “Boom, Oaxaca,” in Fresno, California and a forthcoming manuscript will be published in the journal Latino Studies later this year.
Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet & teaching artist based in Denver, Colorado, USA. Francis is the author of two poetry chapbooks: BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department 2022) as well as the forthcoming MISEDUCATION (NDR 2023), winner of the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. They have received fellowship support from CantoMundo and The Watering Hole. Francis is a coordinator with Slam Nuba and a reader for Underblong. They have poetry published widely, as well as audio and video poetry, all of which may be found on their website phaentompoet.com. Find them on social media @phaentompoet
Si-Min Chong (Min) grew up in the industrial west of Singapore, where the air smells of cacao. She makes work about vessels: women, trees, and snakes. Her work has received support from University of East Anglia’s British Centre for Literary Translation, Black Warrior Review, [PANK] and Sine Theta Magazine. She is now pursuing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships included Tangie Mitchell, Desiree S. Evans, Gisselle Yepes, Cecilia Caballero, Soonest Nathaniel, Zara Jamshed, Javeria Hasnain, Tiffani Ren, and Jalynn Harris.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.
Applications are now open for Fall 2023 residency applications. For the fall, we have fellowships available for Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers and women and nonbinary writers.
