Call for Mellon HSI Crossing Latinidades Creative Writing Fellows

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year; the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year; and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color and progressive online publishing platforms, please visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.

Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, April 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry, a 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet, a 2020 Believer Magazine Editor’s longlist in Poetry nominee, a 2021 PEN/America Jean Stein Award finalist nominee, as well as winner of a 2020 Southwest Book Award (Border Regional Library Association). He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, CA with lineage in both the Bracero Program and Dust Bowl. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Academy of American: Poets Poem-a-Day Series, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, among others. A recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate at Fresno State, he collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio and is an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and poetry editor for Omnidawn. He currently teaches Ecopoetry at Fresno State.

Son of farmworkers, Juan Felipe Herrera lives in Fresno with his wife, poet, Margarita Robles. During the last fifty years, he has dedicated his life to poetry, community, art and teaching. In the last ten years, he has been the Poet Laureate of California and of the United States. Various awards include the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, LA Times Robert Kirsch Award, Latino Hall of Fame Award, Pushcart Prize, UCLA Chancellor’s Medal and UCRiverside Lifetime Award. With over thirty books in various genres, his recent work is Every Day We Get More Illegal (City Lights Publishers). He is a graduate of UCLA, Stanford, University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Currently, he coordinates the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at Fresno State.

Jen/Eleana Hofer is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, facilitator, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire (2010-2020) and the language justice collective Antena Los Ángeles (2014-2021). Eleana/Jen lives on unceded Tongva land at the confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco in Northeast Los Angeles, where they teach writing, DIY bookmaking and literary translation, and support community groups in building equitable communication. They have received support in many forms from many entities, including CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center. They publish poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Their translations of Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas will be published in 2021 by Litmus Press. Between Language and Justice: Selected Writings from Antena Aire will be published in 2021 by The Operating System. Jen/Eleana identifies as a queer white Latinx/Argentinean Jewish BDS supporter who grew up mostly monolingual in a bilingual/bicultural family and finds in language justice work a powerful intersection between healing, social justice, and the transformative possibilities of language and radical listening across difference. 

Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, playwright, award-winning author and podcast host. She is the author of two poetry/prose collections: Island of Dreams (Floricanto Pres), Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry (Arte Público Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, Machete, was a finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry and is forthcoming as part of Noemi’s Akrilica Series in 2022. Her YA memoir A Bucket of Dirty Water: Memories of My Girlhood and her debut picture book Josefina’s Habichuelas (Arte Público Press) will be released in Fall 2021. Her work is included in the forthcoming YA Latinx Anthology Wild Tongues Can’t be Tamed (Flatiron, Macmillan), and in The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books).