Announcing the 2025 A Public Space Writing Fellows

The 2025 A Public Space Writing Fellows

YAW ATUOBI, KASIA NIKHAMINA, RAINA WELLMAN

Since 2014, the Writing Fellowship at Public Space has been an annual chance for us to seek out work by emerging writers and provide support at an early, critical stage in their career. It is a global affair, with writers from all parts of the world eligible to apply. The program has supported more than thirty writers from eight countries over the past decade, with fellows going on to win international awards, publish debut collections, and grow their unique talent. This year, we are delighted to welcome three new, outstanding voices to our community of fellows: Yaw Atuobi, Kasia Nikhamina, and Raina Wellman.

Our deep thanks to the Readers Committee for the 2025 Writing Fellowships: Louis Harnett O'Meara, Lydia Mathis, Maurice Rodriguez, Klein Voorhees, and Kyle Francis Williams.

As part of their applications, all fellowship candidates are asked to write about an author whose work has been meaningful to them, and so we had the privilege of meeting them as readers too.

Yaw Atuobi reads Édouard Glissant

That’s one thing I’m letting go of, dates of things, that way time turning full speed can catch us up. One other thing I’m not hanging on to is the imperative. Get up, walk, take root. Get up, suffer, die. The imperative is the worker’s hymn.

This is from Édouard Glissant's novel Mahagony. Before this moment in the novel, Hégésippe labored under the imperative. He sought to imitate: document, settle, establish, like the masters he learnt from. I can trace in this a trajectory of my own literary education. His condensation of the imperative moves me—get up, walk, take root ... suffer, die—which in my context I have interpreted as the hymn or the vocational (literary) wisdom of plot movement, character development, epistemological certainty and narrative transparency. The workshops and publishing advice steer me towards the simple, visceral, confessional. To reject these is to also reject the clarity around my career. Yet I find courage, alongside Hégésippe, in the high-velocity chaos of my world and the contradicting orders that animate it.

Yaw Atuobi's work has been published in Jalada Africa, Za!, A Mind to Silence and other stories: the Caine Prize for African Writing, and elsewhere. Until recently, they were a residency assistant and critic in residence at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. They curate the multidisciplinary project littoral zone(s) and live in Accra, Ghana.

Kasia Nikhamina reads Hilary Mantel

“The king says no. It is not because of my family, or your family—he calls you his cousin. He is, at this moment, his disposition to us, I would say it is excellent. But he needs Mary for himself. The child is due in late summer and he is afraid to touch Anne. And he does not wish to resume his celibate life.” Richard looks up. “He said this?” “He left me to understand it. And as I understand it, I convey it to you, and we are both amazed, but we get over it.”

What I love in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall—this passage is just one example—is how she manages to make Thomas Cromwell sound and feel so modern, so alive. As if 1533 were yesterday and not five hundred years ago. She does it so convincingly that, reading, I forget that she’s making Cromwell sound that way. She’s writing him. She’s making choices constantly... Arranging his face before he enters Henry’s court, refraining from giving away pieces of himself, his past. If he were alive now and I read about him in the Times, I would surely hate Cromwell. But reading Mantel, I can’t look away from him.

Kasia Nikhamina was born in Poland in 1985 and grew up in New York City. She received a BA in comparative literature from Columbia University and runs Redbeard Bikes in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Roxane Gay's newsletter The Audacity, and she writes the weekly newsletter Divinity School.

Raina Wellman reads Eve Babitz

One afternoon I was sitting on a veranda at a party with about six women and the information that was exchanged, commonly called gossip, was enough to run the world for months. Suddenly a hush fell over the women and I looked around and there was a man. The women slid masks over their faces, the subject changed, the man said, “What are all you girls doing out here? Come in and join the party.” And the summit conference was over. —Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

Gossip seems to be the ruler of the season, at least mine. It is spring after all. I have friends opening up about their private dramas, friends breaking up, friends cheating on each other, friends walking in on each other, friends falling in love, I’ve honestly begun feeling a bit overwhelmed with what might be called, “the hot gossip.” I love reading Eve Babitz because she has a unique capability to create intimacy, to write in a way that feels like talking to a thoughtful, experienced, and playful friend. I picked this out of many very quotable pieces that also have that feeling. It’s an effortless expression of what is both silly and true. Babitz does a wonderful job of capturing the depth, absurdity, and poetry of moments that are often looked over.

Raina Wellman received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She has worked with Printed Matter, Center for Urban Pedagogy, and the Museum of Natural History, among other places. She lives in New York City.

Our gratitude also to the individuals, organizations, and foundations who share our commitment to the mission of these fellowships and have provided crucial support, including the Hawthornden Foundation and Amazon Literary Partnership.