Fellowships
Past and Upcoming writing fellowships and residencies I have had the priviledge of participating in.
The Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Writing
UPCOMING in Umbria, Italy in 2026. I'm immensely grateful for the nomination and selection to be included in the 2025 - 2026 cohort of writers, composers, and visual artists.
In the Civitella Ranieri Foundation informational video below, the words of Iranian writer AZAR NAFISI author of Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter and Reading Lolita in Iran: A Memoir in Books resonate for the times we live in. NAFISI says:
"For as long we're human, we need to imagine and we need to think. No government and no power on Earth can change that. Art resists tyranny by revealing the truth and truth is always dangerous because once you know it you can't remain silent."
The Civitella Ranieri Fellowship is managed by the CR Foundation based in New York, home of its founder Ursula Corning.
The University of Iowa - IWP Writing Fellowship
This was undertaken in 2023 with the support of the US State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the US Embassy in Suva, Fiji. The IWP FR Fellowship takes place at the University of Iowa, home of the first (oldest) Creating Writing MFA programme in America - the Iowa Writers Workshop. There are three long projects from this fellowship that are now the subject of ongoing work toward completion. This digital publication The BOKOLA Series is part of the 'making sense' of my thought and writing which occurred in Middle America.
The Iowa Fellowship comprises lectures, panel discussions, readings and community engagement in Iowa City, the University of Iowa, and cultural trips to Chicago and New York.
Two are associated with institutions within the University of Iowa: the UI Museum of Natural History which appeals strongly to my interest in the natural world and nature writing. The second is the UI Stanley Museum of Art where I had a life-altering encounter with a Jackson Pollock painting, Mural (1943). Encounters in both institutions continue to inspire new ways of seeing and thinking of material in my writing. New pieces of fiction and nonfiction have emanated out of communion with collections in both institutions.
The most significant gift of this fellowship is the sense of community and exchange fostered between writers, some well on the way to becoming lifelong.
The Oregon Institute of Creative Research - Writer-in-Residence
This is a Follow-On opportunity emanating from the University of Iowa's IWP Writing Fellowship. OICR is an institute founded to promote Critical Theory and Creative Research. Founded by visionary Professors Anne-Marie Oliver and Barry Saunders, the institute has a pool of programmes and works quietly in advancing deep work necessary for the worlds we live in. The OICR administers the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research which it runs periodically. The OICR's own words best describe this:
"In honor of one of the most startling minds of the twentieth century, we inaugurated the Hannah Arendt Prize in 2012, with the blessing and support of numerous individuals, including Arendt’s former assistant, Professor Jerome Kohn, former Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School University. Focusing on a contemporary topic we believe Arendt would find of utmost critical importance were she alive today, the annual essay prize in her name is devoted to creative research and a set of core principles and assumptions at the heart of the arts and new humanities, including sense-based intelligence; the reality of singular, nonrepeatable phenomena; ethical vision; and consilience between inner and outer, nature and reason, thought and experience, subject and object, self and world.
Reading Night in Portland, Oregon. The highlight of Portland was Powell's Bookshop and the deep conversations around art, artists, the history of art and artistic practice across genres. With fellow writer Marina Porcelli in pink (centre) and closest to camera (in black, right). Our hosts, Professors Anne-Marie Oliver (beside & behind me) and Barry Saunders (our 'Revered Elder').
The double gift of writing fellowships in Iowa and Oregon will have lifelong impact on my sense of self and my writing practice. Two of us were nominated from the 2023 Iowa programme for this follow-on Residency in Oregon, Marina Porcelli of Argentina (fiction/sports journalist focusing on women's boxing) and I (Fiji).
This residency adds to the Iowa IWP-Oregon OICR growing legacy where we joined earlier Fellows: Salah Badis of Algeria (2018) and Robert Gal, a Slovak writer based in the Czech Republic (2019).