Announcing the 2026 A Public Space Writing Fellows

The 2026 A Public Space Writing Fellows

Our gratitude to the writers—over 1,200 from around the world—who shared their work this year. 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.

We are thrilled to announce the 2026 Writing Fellows and to welcome them to A Public Space:

CAROLINA MURRIEL, KAUSHIK RAMU, JOANNA YAMAKAMI

Since 2014, the Writing Fellowship at A 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: Carolina Murriel, Kaushik Ramu, and Joanna Yamakami.

Our deep thanks to our former Writing Fellows, who served on the readers committee for the 2026 Writing Fellowships: Yee Heng Yeh, Kasia Nikhamina, Cory Howell Hamada, Kristen Gleason, and Gothataone Moeng.

Carolina Murriel reads Cristina Rivera Garza

Liliana had been here, and was here now. Her body, hurriedly passing us by. The smoke of her cigarette. The subtle echo of her shoes. What turns on in our brains when we become utterly convinced, convinced against any evidence, that what we lost long ago will suddenly appear in front of us?

Cristina Rivera Garza's memoir about her sister's femicide, Liliana's Invincible Summer, has some of my favorite passages in nonfiction. Returning to Liliana’s university, thirty years after her death, Cristina writes about the energy of the campus in exquisite materialist detail—her descriptive powers attuned to the physics, the biology, the beingness of the young people living in the chaotic ecstasy of building a life toward an unknown, limitless future. In her practice of letting the physical space around her impact her deeply, Cristina writes about the students not just as representations of her dead sister, but as energetic descendants of Liliana's. Because her atoms, her energy, her vivacity remains, in theirs. As a memoirist rooted in family history, I am deeply interested in the ways we make ancestry for one another, and the ways our dead remain with us, whether on the spiritual or material plane.

Carolina Murriel is a co-founder of Pizza Shark, a podcast studio working toward radical inclusivity in media. She previously covered immigration, music, arts, and culture for the BBC World Service, Miami's NPR affiliate, and The Miami Herald. Her work can be found in California Sunday, the Undocupoets anthology Here to Stay, and elsewhere. She lives in Louisiana.

Kaushik Ramu reads Gustave Flaubert

As if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.

The words we type will fail tests of purity, power, or meaning; language (“like a cracked kettle”), impure and awkward, is all we have. As we read, this passage is a resting point, a cadence at which to get a cup of coffee or look out of the window; at the same time, in raking up fundamental questions of why and how we write, it flexes like an invertebrate in the light of shallow seas, brings all of the universe into the last few sentences of a fragment—that’s why I love it and admire it. And if that feels like a defense of ordinary lives, the culmination of the novel’s arc gives us the triumph of cruelty, when Emma bubbles and blisters for forty pages in the most terrible death in literary fiction.

Kaushik Ramu grew up in Bangalore and lives in Pune, where he teaches at FLAME, a liberal arts institution. He has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he studied engineering and business and worked in global outsourcing. His work is forthcoming in New Literary History and the engine(idling.

Joanna Yamakami reads Shigeko Kubota

I opened a bottle of mineral water with a bottle opener. I saw the ocean of Marseille inside the bottle.

At the Japan Society, among the materials on view, a small card, no larger than a flashcard, caught my eye: Shigeko Kubota’s response to Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem piece. What we contain inside is often as mysterious and vast as the ocean, with all its elusive tendencies, with its curiosities. For me, poetry is the ocean of Marseille. We collect ourselves, risk everything to peek inside, enter a flowing state of play, and find the world contained in the shape of a bottle. This passage acts as a calling and a command to me (and I often feel it as Mieko’s spatial poem instruction to me). As I both enter and continue the poetic Fluxus lineage, my reply to her call over fifty years later reads: Listen to the waves in your brain. Catch them in your bottle. Call it a poem.

Joanna Yamakami is a Japanese-American poet from Northern California, currently based in Brooklyn. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, Notch, West 10th, Spires, and EMBODIED. She received her BS in media, culture, and communication from New York University, and is a 2025 graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program.

The Writing Fellowship is supported, in part, by a grant from Amazon Literary Partnership. Our gratitude also to the individuals, organizations, and foundations who share our commitment to the mission of our fellowships and have provided crucial support, including the Hawthornden Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.