THE 2024 KWELI EMERGING WRITER FELLOWS

Kweli has been mentoring underrepresented writers since December 2009. Designed to help emerging Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) writers hone their craft, this fellowship provides 11 months of editorial support from Kweli editors along with the following benefits:

-a $2,000 stipend,

-free enrollment in our annual International Literary Festival and Color of Children’s Literature Conference,

-publication in Kweli Journal,

-all-expense paid writing retreat,

-admission-free enrollment in three professionally led writing workshops on literary fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, and

-participation in four public readings

Former Kweli Fellow Delia Selina Taylor wrote about her fellowship experience. “Never has my work been taken so seriously or held with such keen attention and care. For the first time in a long time, my work as a woman of color, and all my intersectionalities, was not only centered, but celebrated, and for that, I am forever grateful to my amazing and talented cohort, the fantastic workshop and masterclass leaders, and the inimitable and gracious Laura Pegram, who created this beautiful community.”

This year’s program is particularly special because we are also announcing our first Kweli | Michel Marriott Creative Nonfiction fellows; Sonya Soni, Haddy Gassama, Marwa Eltahir, and Arely Guzmán.

This fellowship was created in honor of Kweli Board Member Michel Marriott who lost his battle to cancer this past April. We want to thank the Marriott family for their support and help in creating this fellowship.

JENNY ALGARIN WEBER is a Puerto Rican writer, born in the Bronx and raised in El Barrio. She is working on a novel.

AHDIS BERUK is a writer and performer from Mississippi based in Brooklyn, New York. She is working on a novel.

MARWA ELTAHIR is a Sudanese-American writer and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing examines the intersections of power, memory, and queer theory. She is working on an essay collection.

HADDY GASSAMA is a Gambian-born writer, who moonlights as an attorney and immigration policy advocate. Her work examines the relationship between white and Western points of view and the lived realities and feminism(s) that are inherent in African and/or Black womanhood.

ARELY GUZMÁN is a queer writer who grew up in the Tijuana/San Diego border. A children’s book editor by day and essayist by night, they like exploring themes on cultural identity and queerness.

DR. MALISSA MOOTOO (she/her) is a mixed-race Black woman with Chinese and Jamaican roots who was born and raised in NYC! Her writing focuses on intersections of love, liberation, celebration and joy of culturally marginalized identities. She is working on a children’s book series.

MAYA ELI PEARSON holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is working on a novel that deconstructs copaganda.

YOLANDA SEALEY RUIZ is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and lives in Harlem, New York. She is a native of the South Bronx and is working on poetry and a novel in verse.

LI SIAN GOH is a Chinese-Singaporean writer who writes about art, authoritarianism, immigration and belonging. She lives in New York, where she is at work on a short story collection and a novel.

SONYA SONI is a South Asian American writer-activist and freedom dreamer who resides in Brooklyn, New York, with roots between Southern California and her motherland of Punjab, India. Her creative nonfiction and poetry confronts colonialism, the white gaze, and anti-blackness in the South Asian diaspora through counter-storytelling, and centering transnational solidarity movement building.