Announcing the 2021 Writing Fellows

The A Public Space Writing Fellowship program is built on the belief that early career support is essential for a writer. In this, our eighth year of the Fellowship, we read from our homes, talked on Zoom (you're muted!), and took heart in the stories of 1,100 writers who trusted us with their work.

We're thrilled to announce the 2021 A Public Space Writing Fellows.

Kate Doyle is a writer originally from New England. After seven years in Brooklyn, she lives in Ithaca, New York, where she works at a local bookstore. She has an MFA from New York University, and her work appears in Electric Literature, No Tokens, Anomaly, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She is writing a novel and a short story collection.

In the fall, she barely left her room. Or she took long showers to avoid her roommate, cheerful Laura Heller who was obviously thriving, always running off to intramural tennis, to a capella, to play rehearsal. Meg slept whole afternoons, sliding through blurry dreams. She filled out paperwork to move into a single room.

Jazmine Harris deconstructs personal, communal, and political narratives through photography, video, and text. Memory, both found and fabricated, serves as her primary material; the acts of remembrance inform and shape the processes she employs. Jazmine. holds an MFA from the University of Chicago and a BS from Florida A&M University.

We sat and caught up late into the evening, exchanging memories, making declarations, and laughing ourselves into silence over Koval and then eventually some fancy red wine. Topics of discussion ranged, but all had a root in some seemingly utopianistic desire for systematic change that seemed somehow to have not lost fervor from one generation to another.

Gustavo Rueda worked as a journalist for two major newsletters in Mexico City before moving to Chicago to pursue fiction writing. He has written two unpublished novels in Spanish and is translating them into English.

We should never forget there was always someone who preceded us, someone who started everything and might know the story from the beginning. And, perhaps, we should feel obliged to know who that person was, his name, the year he was born and how many years he lived.