2020 Kundiman Mentorship Lab
New York City
July 2020–December 2020

Application Period: February 1st – March 15th
This program is made possible with support from The Jerome Foundation.

Applications are now closed for the 2020 Mentorship Lab. 2020 Mentorship Lab Fellows were announced in May. The Mentorship Lab supports 3 writers in each genre (Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, & Poetry), who will take Master Classes, Workshops, and receive one-on-one Mentorship.

We are thrilled to have the following writers serving as Mentors this year:
Hala Alyan: Poetry
Gina Apostol: Fiction
Ching-In Chen: Poetry/Cross-Genre
Mayukh Sen: Creative Nonfiction

program details

This program will support nine NYC–based emerging artists for a six-month mentorship program from July 2020–December 2020. This lab will include not only mentorship support from established artists but also writing workshops, master classes, and a culminating reading open to the public. Kundiman has long been a source of community and support for Asian American writers, and we’re excited to offer this space of close collaboration and community guidance.

Mentorship Fellows receive a $1000 stipend, individual mentoring sessions with the Mentor in their genre, six Master Classes, and six Workshops. To encourage learning and community across genres, the Master Classes will include fellows from all three genres. The Workshops will be conducted within specific genres.

ELIGIBILITY

The Mentorship Lab is open to emerging writers who self-identify as Asian American. Writers must not have published a full-length book by the conclusion of the Lab, and cannot be enrolled in a degree-granting program during the time of the Mentorship Lab. Writers must be residents of the five boroughs of New York City, and be living in NYC for the full period of the Mentorship Lab.

Mentorship Lab will meet on biweekly Monday evenings in NYC from September 2020–December 2020. Please make sure you are able to make these class times before applying.

requirements for mentorship fellows

Meet with entire cohort for introductory meeting in July 2020

Participate in biweekly 30-minute check-ins with Mentors from August 2020–December 2020, via phone or Skype
Attend all 6 Master Classes and 6 Writing Workshops on biweekly Mondays from September–December 2020
Participate in culminating public reading in December 2020

APPLICATION PROCESS

Between February 1st and March 15th, apply to the Mentorship Lab by clicking on one of the below buttons. Submit a cover letter and brief writing sample of 5–7 pages of poetry or 5 pages of prose (1250 words max). Mentorship Fellows will be announced by early May. There is no application fee.

2020 mentors

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017 and was the winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her newest poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gina Apostol’s fourth novel, Insurrecto, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and named by Publishers’ Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Her third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant (winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as the chapbooks how to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are a part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee and Houston. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

Mayukh Sen is a food writer based in New York. He has won both a James Beard Award and an IACP Award for his food writing, while his work has also been anthologized in The Best American Food Writing 2019. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker web. He is currently writing a book of narrative nonfiction, to be published by W.W. Norton & Company, on the immigrant women who shaped food in America. He teaches food writing at the New York University.

2020 mentorship lab Fellows

Creative Nonfiction

Veasna Has is a writer and arts administrator based in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn by way of Long Beach, California. She is interested in storytelling through written, cinematic, and dance mediums. Her writing explores themes of family and cultural identity, rooted in her Cambodian American upbringing and an ongoing effort to define what that means.

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Promiti Islam is a New York based writer whose work finds its origins in education, youth advocacy, and feminism. She has an MA in Transcultural and International Education from Columbia University – Teachers College and has developed liberatory pedagogy and programming focused on human rights and equity. The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, Promiti learned early on of the power of language for community mobilization and in amplifying narratives pushed into the margins. She seeks to uplift the nuanced ways in which we experience the world through culture, diaspora, alienation, and a sense of belonging through her writing.

Fiction

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Christopher James Llego is a Filipino-American writer. A Kundiman Fellow, CJ writes about Asian fetishists, chubby chasers, and awkward gay sex. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Yasmin Adele Majeed is a Filipino and Pakistani American writer and editor. She writes fiction about immigrant daughters and has received support from Tin House, Kundiman, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She works as the assistant editor for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and is a founding member of their union with UAW Local 2110. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she lives in Queens. Find her at her website.

Sarah Wang has written for BOMB, The New Republic, n+1, PEN America, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Catapult, Conjunctions, Stonecutter Journal, semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter, The Shanghai Literary Review, Performa Magazine, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, and The Last Newspaper at the New Museum, among other publications. She is a Tin House Scholar, the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction, and a fellow at the Center for Fiction. In 2019, she was a fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Witness Program, which bridges conversations about mass incarceration and migrant detention.

Poetry

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Huiying B. Chan is a creative writer, cultural organizer, and facilitator born and raised in Lenapehoking (New York City). Their body of work explores race, diaspora, intergenerational & ancestral resilience, and love. They work as a researcher for education justice to transform public schools. After hours, they facilitate writing workshops to cultivate radical imagination and healing towards liberation. Huiying has received writing fellowships and awards from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, VONA/Voices, and the Poetry Incubator. They fought for a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and Education from Wellesley College where they were the first to graduate with an Ethnic Studies major since the college’s inception. They love water, and do this work for their communities and queer & trans ancestors and descendants to come.

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Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. She currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW's The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. From Lahore, Pakistan, Raees is a graduate of Bennington College, and currently lives in New York City. Her website is: www.ayesharaees.com

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t. tran le is a poet from Texas currently living in Brooklyn with their partner & three cats. In 2019 they were awarded a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets & nominated for Best of the Net by the Breakwater Review. Their work can also be found or is forthcoming in Kweli Journal, 8 Poems, & Apogee.