We are thrilled to announce the nine exceptional recipients of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil 2022-2023 Emerging Writer Fellowships. Sara Aboulafia, Natalie Adler, Han Chang, JP Infante, Diana Kole, Emmanuel Lachaud, Sabrina Helen Li, Juliana Roth, and Jiaming Tang will each receive a $5,000 grant, editorial mentorship, monthly dinners with distinguished professionals from the publishing industry, a membership to The Center’s Writers Studio, publication in an anthology of the Fellows’ work, two public readings, and more.
The Fellows were chosen from an impressive pool of 706 applicants in a blind judging process by Cara Blue Adams, Raluca Albu, and Ian Denning.
Started in 2011, the Fellowship annually provides a diverse group of New York City-based writers with crucial support. This will be the program’s twelfth cohort.
The new cohort will be introduced at the 2021-2022 Fellows’ final public reading on Thursday, October 13th.
Each year, the judges panel grants Honorable Mention to praiseworthy applicants who do not receive Fellowships. The panel also recommends Alternates in the event that anyone selected as a Fellow is unable to accept the Fellowship. Honorable Mention is considered a significant achievement and The Center congratulates Isabelle Burden (Alternate), Martin Cloutier, Tanner Garrity, Adam Hutchinson (Alternate), Marina Petrova, and Geeta Tewari.
Meet the 2022-2023 Fellows
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Sara Aboulafia
Sara Aboulafia
Sara Aboulafia is a multi-disciplinary writer, artist, and comic. She is interested in uncovering intersectional relationships between language, sound, idea, and story. Her writing has appeared in Slackjaw, Points in Case, and Greener Pastures. She has performed at venues including Kishka Gallery in White River Junction, VT and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC. She studied sketch writing, comedy, and improv with Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) and The Second City.
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Natalie Adler
Natalie Adler
Natalie Adler is writing a novel about gay ghosts. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She works as an editor at Lux magazine and a lecturer at Columbia University. Her essays have appeared in LitHub, BOMB, Electric Literature, Catapult, Autostraddle, and more.
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Han Chang
Han Chang
Han Chang is a writer and designer. His work is in Southeast Review and World Literature Today.
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JP Infante
JP Infante
JP Infante is an educator, writer and Borough of Manhattan Community College alum. He is the winner of PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and Thirty West’s Chapbook contest. His writing has appeared in Kweli, The Poetry Project, Rigorous, A Gathering of the Tribes, and elsewhere. He has been awarded scholarships and fellowships from the NY State Writers Institute, PEN America and The Center for Fiction. He holds an MFA from The New School.
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Diana Kole
Diana Kole
Diana Kole is a writer from New England living in New York. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, X-R-A-Y, and No Contact, among others. She holds an MS in narrative medicine from Columbia and a BA in comparative literature from NYU, where she received a Tory Dent scholarship in creative writing. She is at work on a novel about manipulation, illness, and desire.
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Emmanuel Lachaud
Emmanuel Lachaud
Emmanuel Lachaud is a Brooklyn-born historian, artist, and educator interested in a wide-array of ways humans have told stories. From the moment he learned that history was in fact a narrative as a masters student at City College of New York (CCNY), he has reckoned with the crossroads of truth, perception, and storytelling. In May 2021, he graduated with a Ph.D. in history from Yale University. Since then, he has assumed a position as an assistant professor at CCNY teaching Afro-Latinx and Afro-Caribbean history and culture. Lachaud has likewise run an archival internship at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library funded by the NEH teaching both museum studies and archival paleography. Lachaud’s nonfiction work currently focuses on the nineteenth-century Atlantic and the meaning of “freedom” in postslavery societies in the Caribbean. But it has always been stimulated by a deeper desire to learn a way to tell a new story for the Caribbean—one less obsessed with doom and barebone survival and more fixated on the stories of how people lived, loved, and thrived in a world they knew was against them.
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Sabrina Helen Li
Sabrina Helen Li
Sabrina Helen Li is a writer and teacher from New Jersey. She was a 2022 Iowa Arts Fellow in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her writing has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Threepenny Review, the Boston Review, and elsewhere.
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Juliana Roth
Juliana Roth
Juliana Roth was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction and is currently seeking a home for her novel and collection of short stories. Her writing appears in the Breakwater Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Irish Pages, and Entropy as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing. Currently, she teaches writing at NYU and writes the newsletter Drawing Animals (subscribe here) featuring essays, interviews, doodles, and podcast episodes celebrating our interconnection with nonhuman animal life.
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Jiaming Tang
Jiaming Tang
Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and his writing has appeared in such publications as AGNI, LitHub, Joyland magazine, the Masters Review, Epiphany Literary Magazine (where he won a “Breakout 8” Writer’s Award), and elsewhere.