For Immediate Release: August 11, 2024
Media Contact: Cristina Deptula, Authors Large & Small
Communications Assistant: MusesAndMelanin@gmail.com
(San Francisco, CA) – The Muses & Melanin Fellowship Program is a competitive, fully funded professional development fellowship program for creative writers of color. This virtual Fellowship is designed for women who do not yet have a lengthy list of publishing credits, are not under a publishing contract, do not have literary agent representation, and do not have a doctoral degree in English, Creative Writing, or Literature. Applicants must hold a Bachelor's degree.
Fellows complete an eight-month professional-practices program designed to advance the trajectory of their literary careers. At the program's close, fellows graduate as writers armed with the strategies, preparation, and blueprints they need to launch sustainable careers as professional authors. In its inaugural year, the fellowship was open to women writers of the African diaspora. In 2025, the program's application will be open to all writers of color. Approximately 41% of the applicants were admitted.
Fellows must complete 80% of class meetings and assignments to be eligible for the graduation ceremony. Fellows who meet this requirement will present a public reading at a formal event, receive over $200 in startup money to seed their literary bank accounts, and will be awarded certificates and a Writer's Care Package consisting of practical and fun elements.
The Fellowship extends the work that Program Founder Lyzette Wanzer, MFA began in what she calls 2020's Summer of Racial Reckoning. In the wake of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd assassinations, Lyzette designed and taught a series of professional development workshops for BIPOC writers. Lyzette says, "The resources, networking lists, contests, residencies, and professional literary associations, approaches, and industry knowledge I share in those classes are specifically geared for us. In the publishing industry, writers of color do indeed have differentiated concerns. Muses & Melanin offers a bootcamp-style, cohort-based model that equips aspiring writers with the strategies, savvy, and skills they need to begin careers as professional authors."
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Christina Amazan, BA
Nicole Cech, MA
Dondi Dancy, MBA
Maria Antonieta Flores, MS
Camille Rose Hayes, MA
Linda A. Jackson, MFA
Sabina Letang, MFA
Amissa Miller, MFA
Roshelle Antoinette Patterson, MA
Isabel N. Rendon, BA
Sasha Simon, MPH
Stephanie Teasley, MFA
Ariel Ward, MA
Anna L. Waring, PhD
Jasmine Arianna Wynn, BA
The 2024 Muses & Melanin Fellows
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Lyzette's work appears in over 30 literary journals and books. Her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives (Chicago Review Press 2022) appears on Library Journal's 2022 Top 10 Best Social Sciences Books list, was a 2023 Black Women's Studies Association Selection, and an American Library Association feature title. Lyzette is a contributor to Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press 2023), Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area (Pease Press 2019), and the multi-award-winning The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt-MacKenzie 2012).
A National Writers' Union, Authors Guild, and AWP member, Lyzette has been awarded over 10 literary grants and accepted to 10 artists' residencies across the country and in Canada. She is working on her next book, entitled Building a Career as a Literary Artist of Color.
Muses & Melanin was made possible with support from California Humanities, California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the San Francisco Arts Commissions' Dream Keeper Initiative and Arts Impact Endowment grants.
Learn more about the Fellowship's scope, requirements, and applicant eligibility.
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