The Poetry Project

Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship

Applications for the Poetry Project's 2024-25 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship for Emerging Poets have now closed. Selected fellows will be announced in October

We are thrilled to share this year's Mentors: Amelia Bande, Morgan Bassichis, t'ai freedom ford, Rainer Diana Hamilton, and Marwa Helal. Read more about the ESB Fellowship and about this year's mentors below.

Emerge—Surface—Be is a natural extension of The Poetry Project’s program offerings. It formalizes the distinct yet unspoken pedagogical aspect of The Poetry Project’s programs while providing a unique opportunity to support, develop, and present emerging NYC ­based poets.

The Poetry Project is grateful for the Jerome Foundation's generous support, which makes it possible to host five Mentor/Fellow pairings in 2024–25. This year we are thrilled to partner with Mentors who are working across a broad range of modes—including poetry, but also crossing into nonfiction, criticism, and performance. Mentors will each select an emerging poet to work with over the course of nine months.

Throughout the Fellowship, ESB Fellows will be provided with the opportunity to work one-on-one with their Mentor to develop their craft; explore publication and performance opportunities; and reflect on the professional and community-based dimensions of a writing life. Meetings between Fellows and Mentors can take place both in-person and virtually.

Ideal Fellows will have a project they are working on (or want to embark upon) and/or are working towards new ways of envisioning and bringing forth their writing practice and feel that they would benefit from guidance and support. Each Fellow will receive an award of $2,500. In adherence with US tax requirements, ESB Fellows will be issued an IRS 1099 Form.

2024-25 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship program, timeline, and eligibility requirements can be accessed here.

Please note: due to the volume of submissions, we cannot consider applications that aren’t submitted via this link. If you have any questions about the submission process, or run into any difficulties submitting your application, please reach out to our Communications Director, Will Farris.

2024-25 Emerge—Surface—Be Mentors:

Amelia Bande is an artist, writer and performer from Chile living in Brooklyn. She uses text and visuals to create live capsules of intimacy and low-fi musicals. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Storm King Arts Center, Participant Inc., BOFFO Performance Festival, EFA Project Space, Human Resources LA and more. She's been an artist in residence at Shandaken Projects, Yaddo, Fire Island Artist Residency, Human Resources and McDowell. She was co-editor of Critical Correspondence, an online publication of Movement Research. Her plays “Chueca” and “Partir y Renunciar” were published in a Spanish-English bilingual edition by Sangría Editora in 2012. Belladonna Collaborative released her 2017 chapbook The Clothes We Wear. A sound archive of her early performances was released by Infinito Audio in Chile. She's currently Writer in Residence at NYU's Creative Writing Program in Spanish.

Morgan Bassichis (they/them) is a comedian and writer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. They are the author of The Odd Years and co-editor with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, both published by Wendy’s Subway. Recent shows include Can I Be Frank? (La MaMa, 2024), A Crowded Field (Abrons Arts Center, 2023), Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022), and Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah (Creative Time, 2021). Morgan’s exhibition, More Little Ditties, was co-presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and founder of the POWERHOUSE Residency. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Poetry and others. Her poetry has been anthologized in A Body of Athletics edited by Natalie Diaz, The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Nepantla: An Anthology of Queer Poets of Color and others. t’ai has received awards and fellowships from Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Cave Canem, Camargo Foundation, The Center for Fiction, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Martin House Creative Residency, Kimbilio, New Literary Project, New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Project. In 2019, t’ai became a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship inaugural fellow. She is the author of two poetry collections, how to get over from Red Hen Press and & more black from Augury Books, finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Claremont Graduate University, finalist for the 2020 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018) and The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017). They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams, art, and love have taken.

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN, (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). She has been awarded fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest, selected by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Paris Review, POETRY Magazine, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. She has presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in the United States. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Elsewhere