4 emerging poets will revieve a 1 year mentorship
Feature Image Photo by Mrika Selimi on Unsplash
From February to June 2024, four fellows will receive one-on-one mentorship from a leading working poet, attend workshops/talks led by guest speakers, and work with other beginner poets in a cohort led by the poetry editors of Guernica.
The Guernica Poetry Fellowship is a virtual program for beginning poets who have not published books or entered MFA programs and who wish to gather with other poets in learning communities outside of academic institutions. The fellowship, supported by a one-time grant, will allow poets to revise and reimagine their own poems through intensive mentorship.
The program takes place virtually. Participation is free of charge, and fellows will receive a small stipend to support submission and reading fees for their work. Guernica hopes to nurture other opportunities for fellows in this cohort, which may include publication or reading opportunities.
The Mentors:
Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of THEOPHANIES, selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award, and forthcoming with Alice James Books in January 2024.
​A 2022 Djanikian Scholar and winner of The Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, Guernica, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.Â
​A Stadler Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch. She has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers, and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Juniper and MFA Fellow, and currently lives in the Bay Area, California.Â
Visit website HERE
Tracy Fuad’s second book of poetry, PORTAL, won the 2023 Phoenix Emerging Poets Prize and is forthcoming in February 2024 with the University of Chicago Press. It can be pre-ordered here. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere, and have been translated into Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
Visit website HERE
Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the acclaimed author of a novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022) and three poetry collections, notably The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. He was the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win this prestigious award. The Lost Arabs was also shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award; it was released in the US and worldwide through Andrews McMeel Universal. His newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023) is out now.
In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. Omar’s poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, featuring in POETRY magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Margins, Mizna, Wildness, Peril, Circulo de PoesÃa, Australian Book Review, Overland, and Griffith Review, among others. His poems have been anthologised in Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Best of Australian Poems 2021 (Australian Poetry, 2021), Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Vintage Knopf, 2020), the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020), Best Australian Poems 2016 (Black Inc, 2016), and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016).
Visit website HERE
Simon Shieh is a poet, essayist, and educator. ​
His first collection of poems, Master, was selected by Terrance Hayes for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize and will be published in the Fall of 2023. His work has been recognized with a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and 2nd place in Narrative‘s 30 Below Contest 2020. Simon is also working on a nonfiction project that attempts to understand the defining features of a poetics of trauma.​
​In Beijing he founded the teen creative arts platform, InkBeat Arts, and co-founded the Spittoon Literary Magazine, which translates and publishes the best new Chinese writers in English.
Visit website HERE
