The Margins Fellowship shapes an environment in which emerging writers can generate new, original work, build connections, and engage in dialogue with a community of writer peers. Coming into the fellowship as part of a cohort has given past AAWW Fellows invaluable support, friendship, and a literary community that continues to shape their writing careers.
Join us in welcoming our dazzling 2024 cohort: Sreshtha Sen, Karen Mok, Kaitlin Hsu, and Izzy Ampil!
Read more about this year’s fellows!
Karen Mok (she/her) is a fiction writer and mental health advocate. A 2023 Periplus Fellow, her work has received support from The Massachusetts Review, American Short Fiction, and Sewanee Writers’ Workshop.
During her time as a Margins Fellow, Karen will complete a speculative novel project about an Asian American secret society with ambitions to save the world, only to find itself equally vulnerable to the false seduction of power, the neglect of individual and collective mental health, and the muddled lines between activism and adjacency, family and estrangement, truth and performance. She seeks to inform her work with the histories and archives of Asian American community activism in New York City.
Karen is an Advocacy Ambassador for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)-NYC and serves on the Consumer Advisory Board of The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Her advocacy and art are inspired by her time as co-founder of The Cosmos, a mental health community for Asian American women.
Kaitlin Hsu 徐欣 (she/her/她) is a queer Taiwanese poet, translator, and editor from the Bay Area. Her work comes from the swirling miasma of desire, Asian American pop culture, and familial (dis)connection, and can be found or is forthcoming from Poet Lore, Peach Mag, and the lickety~split. She has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and genARTS Silicon Valley, and currently works at Kaya Press as an associate editor.
During her time as a Margins Fellow, Kaitlin will work on her first full-length manuscript of poetry, which incorporates visual elements (photographs, colorful graphics, pop iconography) and text to draw attention to what a queer Asian American femme aesthetic could be—beautifully excessive, yearning, and full of hunger for a sapphic paradise. She is also excited to learn how the editorial process can feed her creative practice and begin constructing this queer Asian paradise alongside her cohort.
Sreshtha Sen (they/she) is a poet from Delhi. They studied Literatures in English from Delhi University, completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and their PhD at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, Gulf Coast, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Margins, Mcsweeney’s, Rumpus and elsewhere. She has previously worked at Poets & Writers, The Believer, and UNLV, and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in expository writing at NYU. They’re interested in the poetics of form and persona and the ways in which that allows for revisions of violence, power, and desire. Their poems engage with forms of multidisciplinary texts, folklore, mythology, and pop culture to both revisit and revise themes of queerness, neo/colonialism, and masculinity.
They’re committed to expressing and enacting solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. As a Margins fellow, Sreshtha hopes to learn, build, and explore ways in which writers and artists can use their labor to resist the ongoing occupation and genocide against Palestinian people, to resist rising fascism in India and everywhere in sustained, concrete, meaningful ways. During this year, they will continue working on their full-length manuscript, a collection of poems exploring form and genre to both examine desires of [trans] masculinity and migration while reckoning with inversely gendered and nationalistic performances of violence and power.
Born in the Bronx and raised in the Hudson Valley, Izzy Ampil (she/they) now lives in Brooklyn. Since graduating from Stanford with a degree in English literature and creative writing, she has worked on the editorial team at The Paris Review and the Culture & Criticism desk at BuzzFeed News. Prior to that, she guided hikes in Desolation Wilderness, taught kids to climb in Hollywood, and did a lot of driving around the western United States. Her recent fiction has been largely preoccupied with the aftermath of faith: how to fill the void left by lapsed romance or religion, especially after sex, drugs, and the fantasy of rural idyll have grown stale. During her Fellowship year, she will continue work on two projects. The first, a short story collection, revolves around flopped epiphanies—whether skydives, DUIs, or family reunions—which fail to alter their characters’ lives. The second is a novel about ski bums and crust punks in southern California. Special thanks go out to her family, for their support, and to Susan Quimpo (1961-2020), who brought her book, Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years, to AAWW in 2017.
Explore our Margins Fellowship alums here.
Through the Margins Fellowship, the AAWW offers emerging writers concrete resources that they can take advantage of, such as access to workshops and trainings, publication opportunities, and programming opportunities in our event space. We give our Fellows a chance to develop as curators, armed with the resources of a literary arts institution.
Margins Fellows have gone on to publish books and chapbooks with W.W. Norton, One World, Viking, Tin House, Ahsahta Press, Platypus Press, Nightboat, RADIX Media, and The Feminist Press; sign with agents at the Wylie Agency and Curtis Brown; publish their writing in Poetry, Granta, Longreads, LitHub, BOMB, and The New Yorker; and receive awards, fellowships, and residencies from Lambda Literary, Tin House, Kundiman, the Yale Series of Younger Poets, La Cité internationale des arts, the Center for Fiction, MacDowell, Believer Magazine, Submittable, and Yaddo.
Emerging writers of ALL AGES are eligible for the Margins Fellowship.
Fellowship Program
The Margins Fellowship is a year-long program. The 2024 fellowship year will run from January to December.
STIPEND: $5,000 honoraria, distributed in three parts over the fellowship year. Fellowship payment will require the completion of an IRS W-9 or W-8BEN form;
RESIDENCY: Fellows are awarded residency time at Millay Arts—an innovative seven-acre artists retreat space at the former house and gardens of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, NY;
WRITING SPACE: 24/7 access to AAWW’s space, when the space reopens. Given that time and space to write are rare in New York, the Margins Fellows will be given keys to the AAWW Reading Room and workspace;
PUBLICATION: Fellows are invited to publish work on our online magazine, The Margins;
MENTORSHIP: In the second half of the fellowship term, fellows are paired with an established writer who will meet with fellows either in-person or virtually at minimum four times during and after the fellowship year. Previous mentors have included Monica Youn, Rick Barot, Alexander Chee, Susan Choi, Carmen Maria Machado, and many more.
CAREER BUILDING: Fellows are offered access to private career meet-ups and meetings with editors, agents, and fellow writers;
GUIDANCE: AAWW Programs Manager and Coordinator will meet with Fellows’ monthly throughout the fellowship year to discuss career goals and how AAWW can help meet them;
FINAL READING: Fellows will take to the stage with their mentors for a final celebratory reading at the culmination of the fellowship year;
HEADSHOTS: We invite a photographer to take professional headshots of our fellows that they can use going forward.
