From top, left to right:
Catharina Coenen, Non-Fiction; Meadville, PA – RESTLESS BOOKS NEW IMMIGRANT WRITING PRIZE FELLOW –
\Catharina is a first-generation German immigrant to Northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her essays have been noted in Best American Essays and appeared in Best-of-the-Net, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Scienced Monitor, and elsewhere. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, a Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Forge, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science-as-Story Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Residency. She co-hosts the International Women’s Writing Guild’s Online Open Mic series and writes about science, family, fascism, and war.
]Jessica Mosher, Screenwriting, Astoria, NY –
Jessica is a Canadian playwright, actress and award-winning screenwriter based in New York City. In 2023, her short screenplay Good Evening, Marshall (Good Evening, Geraldine) won the prestigious Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition and in 2024, her short screenplay Routine Procedure was named a Semifinalist in that same competition. She has also been recognized as a fiction finalist at the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. Jessica is one of six playwrights whose work will be presented by Divine Riot in the collaborative A Train Anthology in NYC in December 2024. She is also an incoming MFA Candidate in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Bennington College, Class of 2027.
Dorinne Kondo, Playwriting, Los Angeles, CA –
Dorinne is a playwright, dramaturg, cultural anthropologist, and scholar of critical ethnic studies and performance studies. She is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the USC, where she served as Director of Asian American Studies from 1997-2002 and again from 2008-2013. Kondo is the author of three scholarly non-fiction books: Crafting Selves, based on fieldwork in Japan, about the performance of gendered work identities in a factory, where crafting objects became a path toward crafting “selves”; About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, which examines the global circulation of Japanese high fashion and Asian American theater as sites where Orientalist stereotypes both circulate and are contested; and Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity, integrating scholarly essays on the work of Anna Deavere Smith and David Henry Hwang with first-person “entr’actes” and Kondo’s own full-length play Seamless. While all her books bend genre, interweaving scholarly discourse with vignettes, interviews, and first-person narrative, Worldmaking is her boldest attempt thus far to reimagine academic writing. A concept from the book, “reparative creativity,” was honored as part of the theme for the 2022 annual conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Kondo received her Ph.D. at Harvard in Anthropology in 1982 and was Assistant Professor there for seven years, specializing in the Anthropology of Japan. She fell in love with theater during her time at Harvard, when she often took trips to San Francisco in order to watch productions authored by Asian Americans and featuring Asian American actors. These life-giving experiences with Asian American theater led her to new scholarly projects on Asian American performance. When Kondo moved to Los Angeles for a new position as Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Pomona College.
Rebecca Emily Darling, Non-Fiction; Los Angeles, CA –
Rebecca Emily Darling is a writer and multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, currently focused on speculative memoir and social justice writing. Her essays have been published on Modern Loss, HuffPost, and HelloGiggles, where they have contributed to important conversations about grief and caregiving. Rebecca is currently at work on a hybrid memoir and family saga about memory, fairy tales, generational trauma, and her loving but tumultuous relationship with her mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia when Rebecca was a young adult.
Patrick Earl Hammie, Visual Arts; Champaign, IL –
Patrick is Professor, Chair of Studio Art, and Director’s Fellow (inaugural) in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his BA from Coker University (2004) and MFA from the University of Connecticut (2008). After gaining tenure at UIUC in 2015, the International Review of African American Art named him an “Artist to Watch;” Poets/Artists Magazine named him one of “50 Memorable Artists of 2015;” The JPMorgan Chase Art Collection acquired his painting Contact (2014). His works are in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Kinsey Institute, Kohler Company, Lawrence University, Purdue University, University of Illinois, and William Benton Museum of Art.
He has exhibited in Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States, at venues that include California African American Museum, The Drawing Center, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Bo Bartlett Center, and the Zhou B. Art Center. Most recently he exhibited at Freeport Art Museum, Coastal Carolina University, Kruger Gallery (Marfa and Chicago), and The Sheldon in St. Louis. Recent commissions include portraits of Romare Bearden for Smithsonian Institute’s traveling exhibition “Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth;” Albert R. Lee, an advocate for Black students navigating Jim (Jane) Crow Laws at the University of Illinois; Mark Burstein, the sixteenth and first openly gay President of Lawrence University; and Willie Reed, the first Black Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University. NE Sculpture | Gallery Factory commissioned a billboard for their Social Justice Billboard Project overlooking George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.
His work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Joyce Foundation, Midwestern Voices and Visions, Puffin Foundation, Tanne Foundation, and Wellesley College. Recently, he co-led a Mellon-funded research cluster, Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas from 2021 through 2023. Currently, he is a co-collaborator on a National Science Foundation Grant supporting interdisciplinary research and teaching across physics and the visual arts.
Kaitlin Hsu, Poetry; Brooklyn, NY – ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS WORKSHOP MARGINS FELLOW –
Kaitlin is a queer Taiwanese poet, translator, and editor from the Bay Area who believes in a free Palestine. Her work can be found in Poet Lore, Peach Mag, and the lickety-split. She is a 2024 AAWW Margins and Brooklyn Poets Fellow and currently works at Kaya Press as an associate editor.