AAWW is proud to offer two fellowships for emerging NYC-based Asian American and Asian diasporic writers. The Open City Fellowship gives writers the opportunity to write narrative nonfiction on the vibrant immigrant communities of New York City. The Margins Fellowship is an opportunity for four emerging creative writers to establish a home for their writing as they make progress on a book-length work.
Open City Fellowship
Open City documents the pulse of real-time Asian America as it’s being lived on the streets of New York right now. We tell the stories of the Asian and immigrant neighborhoods that comprise one million New Yorkers and 13 percent of the city, but that rarely find their way into the mainstream media. We’re looking for writers to create deft, engaging narratives that bring the face, name, place, and heart of the community to issues like gentrification, labor, and community policing in neighborhoods such as Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Manhattan’s Chinatown, and Flushing, Jackson Heights, and Richmond Hill in Queens.
Open City Fellows receive a $2,500 grant, skill-building workshops, and publishing opportunities in The Margins as part of two nine-month fellowship opportunities: the Open City Neighborhoods Fellowship and the Open City Muslim Communities Fellowship.
The Margins Fellowship
The Margins is our online magazine of arts and ideas. We seek to bridge the allegedly contradictory worlds of literary thought and social justice, pop culture, and critical theory while engaging with immigration, race, and transnationalism.
The Margins Fellowship grants a $5,000 fellowship, mentorship, work space, career guidance, and publishing opportunities to four Asian diasporic creative writers based in NYC for a full year. Fellows also receive special residency space at The Millay Colony for the Arts, a seven-acre artists retreat space at the former house and gardens of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Van Lier Fellowship was AAWW’s first fellowship program and was awarded from 1993 to 2005. Given to emerging creative writers of color aged thirty and under, the Van Lier Fellowship supported many Asian American writers at the beginning of their careers, including Cathy Park Hong, Monique Truong, Ava Chin and Tina Chang.