The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College Welcomes Five Writers for Its 2023 Summer Residency Program
Clockwise from top left: 2023 Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellows at Bard College Amira Pierce, Natallia Stelmak Schabner, Alcira Forero-Peña, Juliana Nalerio, and Yu-Yun Hsieh.
Now in its second year, the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College welcomes its cohort of five writers, Alcira Forero-Peña, Yu-Yun Hsieh, Juliana Nalerio, Amira Pierce, and Natallia Stelmak Schabner, this summer. The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 8 through June 28. During their residency, fellows are residing on Bard College at Simon’s Rock campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book-length work.
The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works. During their residency, each Hurston Fellow spends their time working, writing, and researching independently on dedicated projects.
“My work is about the people from a small place in the Caribbean that has changed a lot from the 1970s, and yet in April 2023 its population of Afro-Colombians do not have running water while wealthy new ‘neighbors’ do not seem to have that problem,” says Alcira Forero-Peña about her Hurston Fellowship project. “The town of Barú in the ‘island’ of Barú is being sold as ‘paradisiac’ and ‘pristine’ for and by ‘blancos’ or ‘white’ Colombians and foreigners, who little by little bought land on the island, by diverse means, and today’s native ‘baruleros’ have been left without land that used to be a source of their livelihood. The sea, a vital source of food and some income, increasingly is corralled by the hotels and villas whose owners do not want their guests to be ‘bothered’ with boats passing through so fishing is dwindling. What else has changed? The world has changed in and around Baruleros and this is the focus of my work.”
While in residence as a Hurston Fellow, Yu-Yun Hsieh is working on a novel about a foreigner’s adventures in New York City.
As a Hurston Fellow, Juliana Nalerio is working on a literary and historiographic project to read in and instigate a wild alternative to Humanism’s universal man: The Modern Brown Girl. She is interested in anthropological and historiographic approaches to literature and literary theory, as well as sexuality, visual cultural studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.
During her residency, Amira Pierce is working on Genealogy of Hope, a research/memoir project that focuses on her relationship with two ancestors: Wesley Shropshire, a great-great-great grandfather on her father’s side who lived in Rome, Georgia during the US Civil War and was a slave-owner who took a principled and alienating stance supporting the Union, as well as the story of Sheikh Ahmed Aref El-Zein, a great grandfather on her mother’s side who brought the first printing press to Southern Lebanon and published the journal Al-Irfan, which shared a relatively progressive version of Islam with the world.
In her dissertation “For Narrativity: How Creating Narratives Structures Experience and Self,” Natallia Stelmak Schabner argued that Narrativity—an open-ended, dynamic mental process of form finding and coherence seeking over time—is essential for experience of one’s Self. She illustrated this process at work in the interpretation and imaginative experience of literary works, and in subsequent publications extended these ideas, developing connections to theories of emotion, literary appreciation, action, and contemporary digital technology. “In my project, I plan to integrate the argument in my dissertation with this broader body of work, toward the aim of drafting a book manuscript on Narrativity as a core psychological capacity,” she says of her work as a Hurston Fellow.
“For many adjuncts the path to writing and research is closed. The institutions where they labor do not offer funds or sabbaticals for such work. The Hurston Fellowship is one way to help these women find time for their own work. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first independent scholars—writing on an array of subjects from anthropology to fiction. Like Hurston, our fellows, without institutional support, must make their own way through the world of publication and research,” says Grover.
Post Date: 06-21-2023
The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works. During their residency, each Hurston Fellow spends their time working, writing, and researching independently on dedicated projects.
“My work is about the people from a small place in the Caribbean that has changed a lot from the 1970s, and yet in April 2023 its population of Afro-Colombians do not have running water while wealthy new ‘neighbors’ do not seem to have that problem,” says Alcira Forero-Peña about her Hurston Fellowship project. “The town of Barú in the ‘island’ of Barú is being sold as ‘paradisiac’ and ‘pristine’ for and by ‘blancos’ or ‘white’ Colombians and foreigners, who little by little bought land on the island, by diverse means, and today’s native ‘baruleros’ have been left without land that used to be a source of their livelihood. The sea, a vital source of food and some income, increasingly is corralled by the hotels and villas whose owners do not want their guests to be ‘bothered’ with boats passing through so fishing is dwindling. What else has changed? The world has changed in and around Baruleros and this is the focus of my work.”
While in residence as a Hurston Fellow, Yu-Yun Hsieh is working on a novel about a foreigner’s adventures in New York City.
As a Hurston Fellow, Juliana Nalerio is working on a literary and historiographic project to read in and instigate a wild alternative to Humanism’s universal man: The Modern Brown Girl. She is interested in anthropological and historiographic approaches to literature and literary theory, as well as sexuality, visual cultural studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.
During her residency, Amira Pierce is working on Genealogy of Hope, a research/memoir project that focuses on her relationship with two ancestors: Wesley Shropshire, a great-great-great grandfather on her father’s side who lived in Rome, Georgia during the US Civil War and was a slave-owner who took a principled and alienating stance supporting the Union, as well as the story of Sheikh Ahmed Aref El-Zein, a great grandfather on her mother’s side who brought the first printing press to Southern Lebanon and published the journal Al-Irfan, which shared a relatively progressive version of Islam with the world.
In her dissertation “For Narrativity: How Creating Narratives Structures Experience and Self,” Natallia Stelmak Schabner argued that Narrativity—an open-ended, dynamic mental process of form finding and coherence seeking over time—is essential for experience of one’s Self. She illustrated this process at work in the interpretation and imaginative experience of literary works, and in subsequent publications extended these ideas, developing connections to theories of emotion, literary appreciation, action, and contemporary digital technology. “In my project, I plan to integrate the argument in my dissertation with this broader body of work, toward the aim of drafting a book manuscript on Narrativity as a core psychological capacity,” she says of her work as a Hurston Fellow.
“For many adjuncts the path to writing and research is closed. The institutions where they labor do not offer funds or sabbaticals for such work. The Hurston Fellowship is one way to help these women find time for their own work. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first independent scholars—writing on an array of subjects from anthropology to fiction. Like Hurston, our fellows, without institutional support, must make their own way through the world of publication and research,” says Grover.
Post Date: 06-21-2023