The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Michael Chang, Ashley Taylor, Kelly McQuain, Kyle Dillon Hertz, and Gauri Awasthi as winners of the Spring residency scholarships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
The two winners of the Lambda Literary Fellowship are Michael Chang and Ashley Taylor.
A Lambda Literary fellow, Michael Chang (they/them) was awarded the Kundiman Scholarship at the Miami Writers Institute. A finalist in contests at the Iowa Review, BOMB, NightBlock, & many others, their poems have been nominated for Best of the Net. Their manuscript, <big shot manifesto>, was selected by Rae Armantrout as a finalist for the Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize.
Ashley Taylor [she/they] is a poet performer and an MFA candidate at Spalding University’s School of Professional and Creative Writing. They develop programming that amplifies emerging marginalized voices, focuses on themes of resistance and joy, and engages with texts that address themes of identity, conformity, and the body politic. Ashley is the co-creator and designer for Lipstick University, an online writing program for spoken word poets, as part of an artist collective with Rheonna Nicole (Lipstick Wars Poetry Slam) and Louisville Literary Arts. She is the founder of the reading series River City Revue and collaborative writing workshops Keep Poetry WEird, the author of The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and a teacher at the Jewish Community Center in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find out more @ www.ashleytaylorpoet.com
The winner of the Dr. Kristi Larkin Havens Memorial Fellowship is Kelly McQuain.
Kelly McQuain is the author of Velvet Rodeo, which won the Bloom chapbook poetry prize. His prose, poetry and illustrations have appeared in The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rogue Agent, Spunk, Assaracus and Cleaver, as well as such anthologiesasThe Queer South, Drawn to Marvel, LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia, andRabbit Ears: TV Poems. As a visual artist, McQuain has won prizes from the Barnes Foundation and the William Way LGBTQ Center, and his series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations at Fjords Review. He has been a Sewanee Tennessee Williams Scholar and a Lambda Literary Fellow, and he has received two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. www.KellyMcQuain.wordpress.com
The winners of the Fellowship for Marginalized Writers are Kyle Dillon Hertz and Gauri Awasthi.
Kyle Dillon Hertz received his MFA in fiction from NYU, where he received the Writer in the Public Schools Fellowship. He is at work on The Lookback Window, a novel. He can be found on instagram @kyledillonhertz or at www.kyledillonhertz.com.
Gauri Awasthi is an Indian poet and sustainability activist. She is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University in Louisiana, where she has been awarded the John Wood Poetry Prize. When not writing, she runs The Vegan Wardrobe (@theveganwardrobe) to raise awareness about cruelty-free fashion. Her writing has been previously published in The Wire, in two anthologies by Penguin (India), Buzzfeed, and others.
SAFTA will be pairing with 
received her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She co-hosts Shitty First Drafts, a podcast made for and by writers. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Contrary Magazine, Yes, Poetry, Rogue Agent, and Crab Orchard Review.
Beth Couture
Rax King
For money, 
Macy French
Fox Frazier-Foley is the author of two prize-winning poetry collections: The Hydromatic Historics (Bright Hill Press, 2015), which was selected by Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord as the recipient of the Bright Hull Press Poetry Award, and Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014). Her most recent volume of poetry, Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2017) was nominated for an Elgin Award. She edited the anthologies Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among the Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). Fox was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Binghamton University, and was honored with merit-based fellowships at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. She was a Provost’s Fellow at the Univeristy of Southern California, where she earned a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. Fox created and manages Agape Editions. She is currently at work in a long-form journalism project about violent crime in upstate New York, titled Carousel.
Muriel Leung is the recipient of the Alternating Current sponsored fellowship. She is the author of Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal and co-host of The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast. Currently, she is a Dornsife Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at University of California. She is from Queens, NY.
Nicole Shawan Junior (Smith College BA, Pace University MST, Temple University JD) is a storyteller who was born & bred in the bass-heavy beat & scratch of Brooklyn, where the Bed-Stuy cool of beautiful inner-city life barely survived the crippling caused by crack cocaine. She is a black, queer and hood-born Womanxst. Nicole puts pen-to-paper to capture the journeys of around-the-block black girls. Nicole’s writing has appeared in For Harriet, Rigorous Magazine and The Feminist Wire. Her work has been supported by The Hurston/Wright Foundation, African Voices and the Black Film & TV Collective, to name a few. She’s currently completing Cracked Concrete, a coming of age memoir, and Block Girls, a play. A filmmaker, Nicole directed and co-produced the documentary short Boundless: A Celebration of Black Women and co-produced the YouTube web series This. That. & the Third. Nicole is currently bringing her short film, To Touch A Moth, to production. When off set, Nicole is also the creator of Roots. Wounds. Words. Writing Workshop. Check her out at 
Jane Wong’s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, American Poetry Review, Third Coast, AGNI, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, Artist Trust, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
Mary Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2009) and Always Happy Hour (Liveright, 2017), as well as a novel, The Last Days of California (Liveright, 2014), which has been optioned for film by Amazon Studios. Her stories have appeared in the Oxford American, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, and many others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. 
The Dream of Doctor Bantam,
Tessa Mellas received the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection, Lungs Full of Noise. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. She teaches writing at the University of Maine at Machias, a college so far east it is the first in the nation each morning to see the sun. Figure skater, vermicomposter, vegan, and tender of a fierce feline twosome, she relates to soil and snow.
