2022 Fellows

Hilary Claire Brown

Hilary Brown is a pushcart-nominated poet living in Chicago. Their collection, When She Woke She Was an Open Field (2017), is available from Headmistress Press. Their poem "Philomela in Idaho" was the winner of The Bloom's Outliers poetry contest. Other work can be found in Queerly, Apt, the Ocotillo Review, and the South Carolina Review.

Image description: Hilary Brown, a light skinned person with curly hair and glasses, is in front of a brick wall. They are wearing ear buds because they forgot to take them out. They look very poetic.

Carol Dorf

Carol Dorf's poetry been published in three chapbooks, and in journals that include "Unlikely Stories," "Great Weather For Media," "About Place," "Slipstream," "The Mom Egg," "Sin Fronteras," "The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics," "Scientific American," and "Maintenant." She is founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, and taught math in Berkeley. She is interested in the interconnections between poetry, disability, and science.

Image description: Woman in garden, with gray hair, dark eyebrows, light skin, sunglasses, wearing a printed blue, red, and purple shirt, over a black T-shirt. There are red flowers (or perhaps leaves) on the ground, green bushes, and a few white flowers.

Pinka PopsicKle (Priyanka D'Souza)

Pinka PopsicKle (Priyanka D'Souza) (she/her) and her cold, sick, and fabulous alter ego, Pinka PopsicKle, is an ‘artistorian’ from Mumbai, India. In her academic and artistic practice, she works with Mughal miniatures, early modern Natural History, and the concept of the ‘ajai’b’ (wondrous/strange), particularly in imaginings of borderlands of nation-empires, and as applied to anomalous/disabled bodies.She also runs @restingmuseum on Instagram to bring rest into the museum studies and art history discourse.

Image description: Pinka is wearing a bright pink oversized jacket, pink-lensed glasses and a golden tiara. She is holding a red candle and looking sideways at the viewer.

Noa/h Fields

Noa/h Fields is a Chicago-based writer and curator. Her poetry chapbook WITH was published by Ghost City Press. You can find her writing in Anomaly, Tripwire, Elderly Mag, PUBLIC, Electronic Beats, Filthy Dreams, Quarantine Times, and Sixty Inches. She works at the Poetry Foundation and is a 2022 Disability Lead fellow.

Image description: A white trans femme takes a selfie outside in the sun. She is wearing a white pleated dress and a textured pink jacket. Her brown curly hair and long earring are blowing in the wind.

Tea Gerbeza

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is a queer disabled poet and multimedia artist. She holds an MFA in Writing (University of Saskatchewan) and an MA in English & Creative Writing (University of Regina). Most recently, her scanograph, “My Father Catches Me Confronting Memory,” won an Honourable Mention in Room magazine’s 2020 Cover Art Contest, and she was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Emerging Poet Prize. Tea resides in the Canadian prairies with her spouse and three corgis. Find out more on teagerbeza.com.

Image description: A white woman with brown eyes and hair and large green/blue glasses smiles at the camera. She is wearing red lipstick, handmade paper-quilled petal earrings, and a collared green fox dress. 

Jason Irwin

Jason Irwin is the author of the three full-length poetry collections, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020), and two chapbooks. His awards include the Transcontinental Poetry Award for a first book and the Slipstream Chapbook Prize. He has also had nonfiction published in various journals including the Santa Ana Review, & The Catholic Worker. Recent projects include a memoir in-progress, and the Pittsburgh Live/Ability Project in conjunction with City of Asylum. He grew up in Dunkirk, NY & now lives in Pittsburgh. Follow him on Facebook and his blog.

Image description: Jason Irwin’s head and shoulders sitting in front of a wall of photographs, taken by his wife Jen Ashburn. There are photos of Irwin’s family members and friends, heroes like Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Day, Emiliano Zapatta and Albert Camus, as well as one of two otters kissing. In this photo, he looks serious.

Jonathan Mack

Jonathan Mack was raised in the US, but has lived most of his adult life in India and Japan. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. In 2016 he was a Lambda fellow in fiction. Six years ago he decided to live as simply as possible, so as to devote himself to reading deeply in secular and sacred literature. He now lives in Jalisco, Mexico, and works the harvest season on a farm in New Hampshire.

Image description: A dark-haired white man with a gray beard and tired eyes smiles gently beside a large tree.

Elizabeth Meade

Elizabeth Meade is a poet with Cerebral Palsy who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the daughter of a Cameroonian immigrant mother and London-born American father. Born against the odds of survival at 22.5 weeks, she weighed just 1.1 pounds. This miracle inspires her enthusiastic exploration of life, immense gratitude, and compassionate heart. She began writing poetry when she was 14, shortly after she inexplicably lost her ability to walk. She enjoys reciting her poetry, traveling, connecting with people, animals, and nature, as well as writing the occasional song. Her poems have appeared in the magazines Kaleidoscope and The Laurel of Asheville and are forthcoming in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers. She is currently working on the manuscript for her first book of poems.

Image description: A smiling woman with light brown skin, short curly black hair, and dark brown eyes behind dark reddish purple glasses wearing magenta and gold fan shaped tassel earrings and multi-colored patterned shirt. She is sitting in a black power wheelchair with a yellow golf ball as the joystick. She is in the sunlight with a blurred building and a couple trees in the background.

Arianna monet

Arianna Monet (she/they) is a queer Black poet and strawberry ice cream enthusiast from eastern Massachusetts. Her work can be found in What Are Birds? Journal, FreezeRay Poetry, and elsewhere. Arianna was also a member of the 2019 Boston Poetry Slam Team.

Image description: A Black femme in front of a grassy background. She is wearing a white dress and a necklace with deep blue stones. There is a marigold tucked into her dark curly hair, which falls just to her shoulders.

Walela Nehanda is a Black, non binary, disabled, queer, demisexual cultural worker from Los  Angeles. They have been featured in publications such as: SELF Magazine, Teen Vogue, The  Guardian, Nylon Magazine, as well as listed in Out Magazine's annual Out 100 list recognizing Walela's community work.

Image description: A Black person wearing glasses, a white dress, and a beaded necklace.

Tate N. Oquendo

Tate N. Oquendo is a writer, editor, and educator that crafts occult writing, pop culture works, and multimodal visual art components. Their work can be found in numerous literary journals, a hybrid memoir, six chapbooks, and their recently published full-length poetry collection we, animals. They serve as an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications. 

Image description: A Latinx nonbinary person in front of trees with short brown hair and gray glasses. They are wearing a black and white flannel shirt over a black t-shirt and have multiple earrings and a septum ring. 

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, brown, disabled, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker and author of the poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019.) Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places.

Image description: Black and white photo of a queer brown poet with long dark hair. She is wearing eyeliner, hoop earrings, nose rings, a sleeveless tee, and behind her are some tree leaves.

David James Savarese

David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, multi-genre writer, and public scholar who teaches poetry writing through Listen2Us and the LYNX Project (Chicago). His creative publications include Studies in Brotherly Love (PromptPress, 2021); A Doorknob for the Eye (2017); the Pushcart Prize-nominated “Passive Plants”, which is a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018); and the Peabody award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017), which he co-produced and narrated. 

Image description: I'm a white man in my twenties with glasses, a goatee, and short, reddish brown hair, wearing a black turtleneck.