UPCOMING RESIDENCIES 2023

SoPoCo Fellowship Winners

In October 2021, The Georgia Review announced that Aria Curtis, Sadia Hassan, and Tanya Rey won SoPoCo Emerging Writer Fellowships. Curtis, Hassan, and Rey each received a $1,500 honorarium and will attend residencies at the Bowers House in Canon, Georgia, in 2023. Their work appears in the Spring 2022 “SoPoCo” (Southern Post-Colonial) issue, published with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Aria Curtis is an Iranian-American writer from Atlanta. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Offing, The Shallow Ends, Yemassee, and elsewhere. According to GR associate poetry editor Soham Patel, “Aria Curtis’s poems offer a sinuous interrogation of hair as decoration, as vehicle, as loss, as touch. Poignant and courageous, her work’s sensual engagement ‘pulls the tide,’ working to remind us how the body acts as witness and conduit of the bio-cultural.”

READ CURTIS’S WINNING POEMS

https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/baptism-carpet-makeup-tutorial-at-grey-gardens/

“BAPTISM

for my father’s church my mother dresses my sister

and me in orange burned

one hundred times over prays

in Arabic rhythmic applies a steroid cream

to my small blistered crown all my hair

in her palm a loss

I follow her bismillahs swallowing”

Sadia Hassan is a poet and prose writer from Clarkston, Georgia. Her chapbook Enumeration was published in 2020 by Akashic Press and the African Poetry Book Fund. Hassan has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Mesa Refuge. Winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award and 2019 finalist for the Krause Essay Prize, Hassan currently writes and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi, where she is pursuing her MFA at the University of Mississippi. More of her work can be found in the Academy of American Poets’ poets.org, Boston Review, Longreads, and elsewhere. Patel writes that “‘Indian Creek’ considers the cultural expressions of adolescence. Set against the background of Clarkston, Georgia, Sadia Hassan’s entry offers a striking and complex coming-of-age story that deftly evokes the generational responses a family has to sexual evolution through the various lenses that refract it.”

READ HASSAN’S WINNING STORY

https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/indian-creek/

“Grandmother’s eyes were glued to the screen as men in helmets and army fatigues clutched machine guns to their chests. Standing in the doorway of our three-bedroom apartment, I watched as she alternated between covering her eyes and her mouth with her shawl while tiny men in what looked like a desert ran from building to crumbling building. “

Tanya Rey is a queer Cuban-American writer who was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Granta, The Sun, Roads & Kingdoms, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Catapult, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from New York University and has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, San Francisco Writers Grotto, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, UCross, Blue Mountain Center, I-Park, Anderson Center, and others. An early draft of her novel-in-progress was selected as a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and an excerpt was shortlisted for the 2020 Disquiet Literary Prize. She lives in Oakland, California. Says associate prose editor Doug Carlson, “From Miami to New York to the Apalachee Correctional Institute, Rey’s characters—drawn with compassion, humor, and wisdom—spiral through scenes both poignant and powerful, told in a voice at once nuanced and direct.”

READ REY’S WINNING STORY

https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/apalachee-correctional-institute/

“You wanna know why I’m all fucked up? Starts with my moms, right? Our moms was forever scamming, yo. Would take a loan from the Pope and flee the Vatican next day if she could. Was big into credit scams. Used my Social and Shorty’s Social to take out accounts under our names when we was just kids. Was the only ten-year-olds walking around with tanked credit scores, like a couple little washed-up, gambling alcoholics.”

Nationally known environmental activist and award-winning writer Scott Russell Sanders  Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, has published more than thirty works of nonfiction and fiction over the past forty years, including a number of books for children. Among his titles are Earth Works: Selected Essays (2012), A Conservationist Manifesto (2009), A Private History of Awe (2006), The Country of Language (1999), Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (1993), The Paradise of Bombs (1987), and Wilderness Plots: Tales about the Settlement of the American Land (1983). His enduring concerns include the place of human beings in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the relationships between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path.There is no charge for the evening however donations are greatly appreciated. It is very important we have a great turn-out to support this special event!