Call for 2023 Zoeglossia Fellows
If you are a poet (age 21+) who identifies as disabled and is interested in building community and pursuing artistic excellence in a diverse cohort of writers, consider applying to be a Zoeglossia Fellow.
The Fellowship
Zoeglossia Fellows are admitted for a five-year term and join a community of poets with disabilities at various career stages, with a range of styles and poetics. Virtual community-building opportunities are hosted year-round in addition to the flagship Annual Retreat, which Fellows can attend 3 times within their 5-year tenure. The Retreat is fully subsidized, so all Fellows can access workshops, food, and lodging in an accessible venue free of charge. Although travel is not included, partial travel stipends can often be provided.
Throughout the 5-year tenure, Fellows can access a broad slate of professional development opportunities, including workshops, roundtables, and a bimonthly “Second Sunday Salon” series. Dedicated reimbursement streams (up to $300/year) are allocated to each Fellow to offset submission fees, manuscript consultations, member dues, and other professional activities. Additionally, the Zoeglossia team routinely presents opportunities for additional honoraria including curatorial work, marketing/communications projects,as well as conference presentations and workshop facilitation.
The Retreat
Hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences at New Mexico State University, the 4-day Zoeglossia Retreat (Wednesday May 10th to Sunday May 14th) provides a range of professional development and community-building opportunities to poets with disabilities. As the COVID pandemic continues to disproportionately impact the disabled community, the Annual Retreat will be hosted online to ensure all our fellows from across the globe can participate safely. Fellows will again have the opportunity to study with noted disability poets in intimate group settings. Past faculty include award-winning poets such as Raymond Antrobus, Meg Day, and Ilya Kaminsky. In 2023, we will welcome JJJJJerome Ellis and Kay Ulanday Barrett, among others, as Faculty. With a keynote by L. Lamar Wilson, the four-day event offers a variety of generative workshops, craft talks, professional panels, (live-streamed) evening readings, and meaningful mentoring opportunities.
We are building off participants’ positive feedback and also paying specific attention to emerging best practices in:
1) creating accessible content for remote meetings (W3C International Community)
2) ensuring success of virtual events (National Endowment for the Arts)
3) solving case studies simulating Fellows’ access barriers, needs, and preferences (National Arts & Disability Center)
Our Vision
Zoeglossia was formed to support and highlight the work of poets with disabilities. Our mission is to create an open, transparent, and supportive community that celebrates disability poetics and welcomes and fosters disability creativity. We advocate for literary arts communities to center disability justice and disability intersectionality (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability). Valuing our interconnectedness is essential to authentic social transformation and collective liberation. We hope you will consider joining us. See application details below.
What: A call for new Fellows to attend the annual Zoeglossia Retreat. Across 4 days (May 10th - 14th, 2023), Fellows will access a range of professional development and community-building opportunities. In particular, Fellows will deepen their practice by generating and workshopping new writing with peers and a rotating Faculty cohort. Additional core activities include daily craft talks, panels, and evening readings, open to the public.
Cost: Registration is FREE.
Who: Poets, age 21+, who identify as disabled are eligible to apply. Writers within the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities are highly encouraged to apply.
When: Fellows must be able to attend morning workshops, afternoon panels/craft talks, and evening readings. (See full details below)
Fellows attend:
Opening Keynote (6pm - 6:45pm CST):
May 11th
Welcome Circle (7pm - 8:30pm CST):
May 11th
Fellows attend:
Morning workshops (9am - 11am CST):
May 11th
May 12th
May 13th
May 14th
Fellows encouraged to attend:
Afternoon craft session (2pm-4pm CST)
May 11th
May 12th
May 13th
Fellows attend:
Evening readings (7pm-9pm CST):
May 11th
May 12th
May 13th
Fellows attend:
Closing Circle (12pm - 2pm CST):
May 14th
Applications open Dec. 15th, 2022, and close Feb. 15, 2023 (11:59 pm EST).
Acceptances will be offered in mid-March, with the official 2023 Fellows announcement will happen the first week of April 2023.
How: Prepare a 500 - 1,000 word statement about disability poetry and disability poetics. We are interested in why you write and how you think about your writing. We encourage you to review this sampling of recent essays, folios, and interviews as they provide potential entry points, framing possibilites, and context considerations for your statement.
● Poetry is a Way of Being in the World That Wasn’t Made for Us, Jennifer Bartlett
● Amodern #10, Featured Issue: Disability Poetics
● To Hold the Grief & the Growth: On Crip Ecologies, Kay Ulanday Barrett
● Unfit to Print: Refusing the Page in Deaf Poetics, Meg Day
● Poetry, Disability, and Vigilance, Raymond Antrobus
● Deaf Poetics: A Conversation with Jospehine Dickinson
● Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp, Jim Ferris
● Roundtable Discussion on Poetics and Disability, Poetry International
● Make No Apologies for Yourself, Khadijah Queen & Jillian Weise
Assemble 8-10 pages of poems (published and/or unpublished) in a single file. PDF format is strongly preferred for the work sample file. (NOTE: On Windows and Mac OS, Word docs can be exported as PDFs or saved as PDFs).
In the application there is a field to list CW for each poem. Out of respect for our volunteer readers, we require you include a content warning if your work sample references or depicts personal or historical trauma (including violence, genocide, assault, abuse, etcetera).
For a primer on content warnings see An Introduction to Content and Trigger Warnings (Inclusive Teaching Sandbox, University of Michigan).
Application for 2023 Zoeglossia Fellowship
The application link above is a Google Form. As long as you are logged in from your Google account, your progress is automatically saved as a draft for 30 days. This means if you can't complete the application in one sitting or need to switch devices, you don't have to start over the next time you open the form.
A suggested $10 submission fee can be donated through the Zoeglossia website. Inability to donate will not affect submissions, as donations will be processed separately from applications.