The Poetry Project has always been dedicated to creating spaces for collective learning and exploration that are counterhierarchical, rhizomatic, intergenerational, and insurgent. It is with this dedication that we are honored to offer our Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship for Emerging Poets.
The Poetry Project is very pleased to share that out of a pool of more than 200 applicants, this year's mentors have selected the following poets as the 2023–2024 cohort of Emerge—Surface—Be Fellows:
Andrea Abi-Karam will work with Gia Gonzales
Kimberly Alidio will work with Sahar Khraibani
Alan Felsenthal will work with Joshua Garcia
Erica Hunt will work with Dana Ysabel Dela Cruz
Cedar Sigo will work with Samuel Espíndola Hernández
In addition to selecting this year's fellows, the mentors identified ten finalists whose names we are grateful to share:
Terrence Arjoon
Samuel Breslin
Sydney Choi
Jay Délise
Leonora Donovan
Lara Carmen Hidalgo
justine hồng-giang nguyễn-nguyễn
Forest Smotrich-Barr
Teline Trần
Sixing Xu
The selected Fellows will work one-on-one with their Mentors to develop their craft; explore publication and performance opportunities; and reflect on the professional and community-based dimensions of a writing life. The Poetry Project will also be thrilled to feature the selected Fellows in paired readings in the upcoming spring season.
Our deep gratitude to everyone who submitted their rigorously creative and care-full applications. We look forward to getting to know this year's Fellows throughout the Fall and Spring seasons!
Dana Ysabel Dela Cruz (they/them) is a Filipino anti-imperialist poet, organizer, and librarian living in New York City. They are a member of Anakbayan Manhattan, an organization fighting for national liberation and genuine democracy in the Philippines. Born to Manila and raised by the Bay Area, they have lived by the ocean their entire life.
Samuel Espíndola is a poet, writer and researcher from Chile living in Queens, New York. He is the author of Resonancias Magnéticas (Pez Espiral, 2021). He is doing a PhD in SUNY at Stony Brook and co-curated with Vania Montgomery the collective exhibition Censorship at The Memory and Human Rights Museum in Santiago.
Joshua Garcia's debut collection, Pentimento, is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press (March 2024). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and was a 2021–22 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
Sahar K. is a writer, artist, and adjunct associate professor at Pratt Institute, born and raised in Beirut, and currently based in Brooklyn. Sahar’s writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Project’s Footnotes, Hyperallergic, Al Hayya Magazine, The Magnum Foundation, FOMU’s Trigger, The Poetry Foundation, among many others, and is the recipient of the Montez Press Writer’s Grant (2020) and a fellowship from Asia Contemporary Art Week. A chapbook of selected short writing and poems, Planned Obsolescence, was published by Durian Days in 2018. Sahar is currently developing Teaching Collaboration, a new pedagogical approach and series of experiments pushing against power structures in the classroom, borrowing from systems of blockchain and the holobiont: an attempt to redistribute/eradicate authority in a way that helps see beyond the hierarchies and structures we currently inhabit.