2020 Fellows

Sylvia Chan

Sylvia Chan (she/her) is an amputee-cyborg writer, educator, and activist. She teaches at the University of Arizona Writing Program and serves as court advocate for foster kids in Pima County and nonfiction editor at Entropy. Her debut poetry collection is We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing 2018), and her essays appear in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She’s working on her foster care memoir and training her second Belgian Malinois for ADA compliance.

Image Description: A long-haired brunette Asian American woman wearing a jade pendant and green blouse; she is pictured alongside her service dog, a Belgian Malinois.

Ava C. Cipri

Ava C. Cipri is a non-binary writer, educator, and activist in Pittsburgh, PA. She co-founded The Deaf Poets Society: An Online Journal of Disability Literature & Art, where she serves as poetry editor. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Ava has an MFA from Syracuse University, takes Madwomen in the Attic Workshops, and authored two chapbooks: Queen of Swords (Dancing Girl Press) and Leaving The Burdened Ground (Stranded Oak Press).

Jim Ferris

Jim Ferris (he/him) is author of Slouching Towards Guantanamo, Facts of Life, and The Hospital Poems. Past president of the Society for Disability Studies and the Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus, he has received awards for performance and mathematics as well as poetry and creative nonfiction. Ferris was Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio from 2015-2019. He is working on a performance and book project entitled Is Your Mama White? Excavating Hidden History. He earned a doctorate in performance studies and he currently holds the Ability Center Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo.

Image description: A white man wearing a blue shirt.

torrin a. greathouse

torrin a. greathouse (they/them, she/her) is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020).

Image description: A white trans woman in front of a wooden shed. She has shoulder-length red hair and a cut through one eyebrow. There is a black cane propped against her shoulder. She is dressed in a gray t-shirt and a blue chambray button-up. She is wearing gold wire-frame glasses and has silver rings in her ear lobes and septum.

Kimberly Jackson

Kimberly Jackson (she/her) is an award-winning Slam poet, author and educator who is also disabled. Jae has won many slam competitions including becoming the 2018 Grand Slam Champion of Steel City Slam, 2018 BOSS Slam Queen of Steel Slam Champion, 2018 Steel City Slam IWPS Rep, 2018 Womxn Slam Champion, three-time Pajama Jammie Jam Slam Champion as well as 2018 Finalist for Baltimore's Slammageddon Slam. She was ranked one of the top 30 slam poets in the world by Poetry Slam International in 2018. In 2019, she headlined a tour of the East Coast and Ontario, presented spoken word poetry at the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication and competed placing as a second-time finalist in Pittsburgh's Steel City Slam Grand Slam Championship, finalist in Guelph Spoken Word Slam (Ontario, Canada) Grand Slam Championship and won Hot Damn! It's a Queer Slam! Guelph, becoming Guelph Slam's representative in the Hot Damn! It's a Queer Slam! Provincial Finals in Ontario, Canada just before her first stroke caused her to develop Aphasia, a language-based disorder. Undaunted, Jae transitioned back to the publishing world with her work being accepted into the 2020 (postponed to 2021 due to COVID-19) BOOM! Charlotte Fringe Festival, featuring in multiple publications both domestically and internationally including 2019's Finishing Line Press cancer survivor anthology, This Thing Called Poetry: An Anthology by Young Adults with Cancer, and other anthologies and journals in 2020.

Image description: A black woman wearing black glasses.

Karl Knights

Karl Knights is an autistic writer with cerebral palsy. His poetry and prose has appeared in The Guardian, The Dark Horse, Under the Radar, and The North. He is twenty-three and lives in Suffolk, England.

Image description: A white man standing in front of a microphone.

Sean Mahoney

Sean Mahoney writes when he needs to. He believes that Judas was a way better singer than Jesus. He lives in Santa Ana, California with Dianne, her mother, 3 dogs, and 4 renters. There is a large garden and two trees with big bitter oranges that look more lemon-like. He co-runs the Disability Literature Consortium that was created in 2016 by like-minded disability advocates, who together felt that Dis-Lit / Crip-Lit needed greater visibility and access. The link is here.

Liv Mammone

Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island, New York. Her poetry has appeared in wordgathering, monstering, Wicked Banshee, The Medical Journal of Australia, and others. In 2017, she competed for Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York national poetry slam team She was also a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in Washington DC. Currently, she works as an editor at Game Over Books and a reader for the literary magazine Anomaly.

Image description: A white femme presenting person with cropped brown hair with purple bangs and brown eyes behind glasses wearing an orange shirt.

Leslie McIntosh

Leslie McIntosh is a poet, performer, educator, and mental health professional living in Jersey City, New Jersey, who has contributed to writing and performance communities in Philadelphia, NYC, and New Jersey. Recently beginning a poetry writing workshop/space in Jersey City, Leslie has participated in regional workshops at Cave Canem’s Brooklyn office and is a fellow of The Watering Hole.

Maurice Moore

Maurice Moore is currently a doctoral Performance Studies Candidate at the University of California-Davis. Moore’s works have appeared in Existere Journal, bozalta Collective, Mollyhouse, and Communication and Critical Cultural/Studies. From 2011 to the present, the creative has exhibited at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London United Kingdom, Calabar Gallery in New York NY, Mnemosphere Project in Milan, Italy, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro North Carolina. 

Alayna Powell

Alayna Powell is a poetry student at the University of Pittsburgh. After completing her bachelors, she plans to pursue an MFA and further her career as a creative writer. Drawing from her experiences as a Black woman, her writings discuss topics such as identity, unresolved trauma, body image, and an impaired relationship with God. This September, she is being published for the first time in Rogue Agent Journal.

Image description: A black woman wearing a nose ring.

Ricky Ray

Ricky Ray (he/him) is a disabled poet, critic and editor who lives on the outskirts of the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019) and the founding editor of Rascal: A Journal of Ecology, Literature and Art. His awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, and a Liam Rector Fellowship, among others. He was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars and can be found hobbling in the hills with his old brown dog, Addie. Ray edits Rascal Journal and his author website is here.

Rae Rose

Rae Rose(she/her) is a California poet and essayist whose work has been published in Cicada Magazine, Lilith Magazine and The Paterson Review, among other literary journals. Her book, Bipolar Disorder for Beginners is an account, in poetry and prose, of her struggles with that disease. Marge Piercy characterizes it as “powerful and emotionally charged.” Rae earned her MFA from Goddard College and is a poetry editor for Writers Resist.

Image description: A white woman with red hair smelling a red rose.