The Open City Fellowship

The Open City Fellowship is a unique opportunity for four emerging Asian American, Muslim, and Arab writers to publish narrative nonfiction on the vibrant East Asian, South and Southeast Asian, Arab and West Asian, and North and East African communities in the New York tristate area.

We are so delighted to welcome our 2024 cohort: Mai Tran, Ailia Zehra, Sabina Sethi Unni, and Chloe K. Li


Read more about this year’s fellows!

Mai Tran is a freelance writer and communications strategist. Mai’s recent journalistic work has covered ethnic studies curriculums, “hate crime” data collection, prison conditions, and the uneven application of reduced sentence credits in Illinois, which prompted an investigation into the state’s Department of Corrections. During the Open City fellowship, Mai will report on trans health services in New York City and Southeast Asian organizing in the Bronx, focusing on formal and informal care networks, coalition building, and local histories. Mai is currently a part-time MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College and a Program Coordinator for Lambda Literary’s Writers in Schools. Mai previously worked for The Bronx Defenders, using writing as a tool for advocacy and policy change. Originally from Southern California, Mai is now based in Queens, New York.


Ailia Zehra is a Pakistani journalist based in New York. She covers politics, religious extremism, and human rights, with a special focus on dissidents in exile. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and New Lines, among other publications. She was previously the managing editor of the Pakistani news magazine, the Friday Times, and has worked as both an editor and a reporter for several media outlets in the country. After moving to the US from Pakistan two years ago, she launched a digital media platform, Dissent Today, which publishes news and articles on human rights issues in South Asia, particularly the stories considered “too dangerous” to publish back home. The platform has featured several writers and activists whose work was censored in their home countries.  During the Open City fellowship, Ailia will be reporting on the Pakistani community in New York and the challenges faced by undocumented immigrants. She also hopes to amplify the work of progressive South Asian voices in America through her reporting.


Sabina Sethi Unni (she/her) is a public theater artist, community organizer, and urban planner who tells funny stories about our changing climate, urban ecology, and the suburbs. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, she’s deeply involved in organizing across Nassau, east Queens, and Rockaway. She was an inaugural New City Critics fellow with the Architecture League and the Urban Design Forum, and has published her writing with Urban Omnibus, Catapult, and Sorjo Mag. She’s published stories about informal vacant lot transformations in east Rockaway, a community food forest in Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx, family Partition archiving in her grandparent’s garage, participatory theater on Zoom, and hybridity in South Asian art. She is a public theater artist, director, performer, and writer who likes to create performances in unusual spaces like vacant lots, open streets, public beaches, waterfront parks, and community gardens, and works as a public space planner.  During her Open City fellowship, Sabina will work on stories about how much she loves the suburbs. Just kidding, but also not really: she’ll be writing about Nassau County’s Punjabi enclaves and how they creatively respond to flooding, food access, social infrastructure, and highway culture.


Chloe K. Li is a Cantonese American storyteller and journalist born and raised in Brooklyn. She is currently working as an Associate Producer at Al Jazeera’s flagship daily podcast, The Take. Previously she worked at WNYC as an Emma Bowen Foundation fellow. Her story on the continued French control over the island Mayotte won her an Anthem Award. She received her BA in journalism at American University, where she was a recipient of the Propublica Diversity Scholarship. She was also a Dow Jones Data Journalism Fellow. Chloe is drawn to the hidden stories that have yet to be fully archived. That’s why as an Open City Fellow, she will be working on stories related to misinformation in Chinese language news outlets and the hidden history of Chinatown gang members and their lives now. She hopes to do this to honor her own family history and the histories of the people she will be reporting with.


Explore our Open City Fellowship alumni here.

Open City is one of the projects of The Margins, the online publication of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. It documents the pulse of metropolitan Asian America and Muslim America as it’s being lived right now.

Previous Open City Fellows have gone on to write and edit for MSNBC, the New Yorker, Curbed, the New York Times, TIME, Granta, and Al Jazeera America, among other outlets. Their works during their time as Fellows have been picked up by NPR, the Atlantic Cities, and the New York Times.