Announcing the 2024 Writing Fellows

We are thrilled to announce the 2024 Writing Fellows: Bre’Anna Bivens, Nina Ferraz, and Oak Morse. Established in 2014, the Writing Fellowships at A Public Space support three writers annually who are at the start of their careers. We think of the fellowships as a series of conversations, about writing and editing, reading and influences—starting with the authors who have been meaningful to the Fellows' work.

Bre'Anna Bivens is a Houston, Texas, native, multidisciplinary artist, and assistant editor at Burrow Press. The recipient of an MFA from Stetson University, she has published work in Guernica and Apricity Press.

Miguel Coronado reads BRE'ANNA BIVENS
This could be an artist’s book. Bre’Anna Bivens describes their project as "an investigation of my past and how fallible my memory is." It draws on Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," remembering things you have forgotten. A performative spin on recollection, connecting personal, often repressed, experiences with generational traumas such as slavery in the American South, the piece collates rememories alongside liturgies, family photos, lyric essay, erasure, negative space. Bivens has really made them their own. —Miguel Coronado is an assistant editor at A Public Space and was the 2021 Editorial Fellow

Nina Ferraz was born in Brazil, where she worked for over a decade as an obstetrician-gynecologist; and now lives in New York City, where she received an MFA in fiction from New York University. Her work has been supported by Disquiet International, CAPES, and CNPQ, and published in The Longleaf Review and Regarding Ingres: Fourteen Short Stories from the Frick Collection.

Hristo Karastoyanov reads NINA FERRAZ
“Wagon Full of Sand” is written in relatively plain prose, but one speaking beyond its words about a formative moment in a life, one in which old inhibitions have to be shed and when the protagonist must reshape themselves and realize their power. The scene with the mother at the beginning was particularly striking, as was the self-identification with the mule, and the ambiguous ending it gives us: the mule has escaped its total enslavement, but must nevertheless still serve—is this the fate that must befall the narrator too? —Hristo Karastoyanov is a reader for A Public Space

Oak Morse lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches creative writing and library media. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson, and his work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, and Up the Staircase, among other publications.

OAK MORSE reads Amiri Baraka
I started writing poems as handwritten notes to myself to find joy in the small things and as gifts to loved ones in my family. Then and now, poetry is a form that allows for expression, confrontation, and excavation of what I may not be able to dig up otherwise. Amiri Baraka said “poems are bullshit unless they are teeth.” I’ve worked to write with more bite, more teeth, about the conditions of the urban Black experience—politically, physically, sonically, emotionally—that gives light to the otherwise mystified experiences of my people.

To learn more about the Writing Fellowship at A Public Space, visit our Fellowships page.