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.
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.
Albert Abonado’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Pleiades, The Margins, Zone 3, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has received a fellowship for poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Every Thursday from 2-3PM, he hosts the poetry radio show Flour City Yawp on WAYO 104.3 FM-LP. He also curates the CityVerse column for City Newspaper. He teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo. He lives in Rochester with his wife.
College in Plainfield, VT. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Connotation Press, Rattle, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other fine journals. Her chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award. Books include Recycled Explosions (Ink Brush Press, 2016) and The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City (Purple Flag Press, 2017; winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award).
Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Winners
Wo Chan is a queer poet and drag performer living in Brooklyn. Wo has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a member of Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Check them out @theillustriouspearl or wo.bingo.
“epithalamium is an incredible dancer working beautifully, relentlessly, spasmodically on a stage that was constructed small enough that the artist must at some point jump into the crowd to make their work the whole scene. The poems in this chapbook are dynamic and unique. The language, music, and energy used caught me off guard many times, and I can think of no better goals than that for poetry. None of these poems are “that blushing thing.” All of them are working and questioning the archetypes and mythologies that deserve to be questioned, and through that process something larger emerges. Through that process we learn to “forget stardust. / think transit. think love.” This chapbook approaches the real world with an otherworldly understanding of its machinations, and despite that deep look into our workings it emerges with a passionate idea of where this could all be headed.”
Steven Sanchez is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Lamb
Brian Kornell earned his MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His writing appears in The Kenyon Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Luna Luna Magazine, OCHO, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared in The Rumpus, where he is the assistant essays editor. At present, he is working on a memoir about growing up gay in the Midwest as well as being closeted and married until he was in his early thirties. You can find him on Twitter @briankornell.
