Kundiman Mentorship Lab
This program is made possible with support from The Jerome Foundation.
The Mentorship Lab supports 3 writers in each genre (Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, & Poetry), who will take Craft Classes, Workshops, and receive one-on-one Mentorship.
”The Mentorship Lab was a life-changing fellowship. I went from feeling like an isolated person who writes to a writer. The validation and support that the program gave me is something money cannot buy. The relationships I formed with my mentor and cohort will last far beyond the length of the fellowship and I will take this experience with me as I continue my literary journey.”
–– Julie Ae Kim, 2019 Mentorship Lab Fellow
program details
The Mentorship Lab ran from 2019–2022.
This program will support nine NYC–based emerging artists for a six-month mentorship program from August 2021–January 2022. This lab will include mentorship support from established artists as well as writing workshops, craft 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 Craft Classes, and six Workshops. To encourage learning and community across genres, the Craft 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 virtually on biweekly Wednesday evenings from 6:30–9:00 PM ET from August 2021–January 2022. Please make sure these times will work for you before applying. A full calendar will be sent out upon acceptance.
requirements for mentorship fellows
Meet with entire cohort for introductory meeting in August 2021, and closing meeting in January 2022
Participate in biweekly 30-minute check-ins with Mentors from August 2021–January 2022, via phone or Skype
Attend all 6 Craft Classes and 6 Writing Workshops on biweekly Wednesdays from August–January 2022
Participate in culminating public reading in February 2022
APPLICATION PROCESS
Between December 1st and January 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.
2021 mentors
Rajesh Parameswaran is the author of I Am an Executioner: Love Stories, which The Washington Post praised as “the advent of a genuinely distinctive voice in American fiction.” Parameswaran’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Five Chapters, and Fiction. “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan” was one of three stories for which McSweeney’s earned a National Magazine Award for Fiction, and it was reprinted in The Best American Magazine Writing. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and lives in New York City.
Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in New York. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She is the author of Pop Song, her debut collection of essays from Catapult, and Fantasian, a queer erotic novella from Badlands Unlimited. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Granta, The Nation, The Believer, and elsewhere.
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of CUT TO BLOOM, the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and their work appears in Barrow Street, Blackbird, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Split this Rock and others. Arhm was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and Associate Director of DEI at a school in New York City. For more information, visit noaharhmchoi.com.
2021 Fellows
Creative Nonfiction
Sabrina Toppa is an award-winning writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, The Atlantic, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, and Public Radio International, among other outlets. She is a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grantee investigating China's investments in Pakistan. Her reporting on Pakistanis in the Middle East was published in the anthology Uncertain Journeys: Labour Migration from South Asia (2018).
In the past, she worked in Mother Jones’ investigative newsroom in San Francisco, TIME Magazine’s Hong Kong bureau, and Nepali and Bangladeshi newsrooms. Sabrina has also reported from Myanmar, Jordan, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
In 2018, her reporting in Pakistan won the Humanitarian Reporting Award from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Center for Excellence in Journalism.
Emperatriz Ung is a Chinese-Colombian game designer, writer, & educator from the American Southwest. When she's not making games, she's at work on her memoir. You can find her on Twitter at @mprtrzng.
JP Viernes (he/they) is a queer Filipino American from Half Moon Bay, California. A lifelong performer, JP toured the U.S. as a child actor and currently dances with General Mischief Dance Theatre. He is a contributor to Dance Magazine and has presented his writing on queer tap dance at the Dance Studies Association national conference. JP studied physics and dance at Columbia University and is now learning to play the acoustic guitar. They live in New York City, and their occasional Wordpress blog, jprambles, lives online.
Fiction
Sheena Raza Faisal is a writer from Mumbai. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, AAWW, and on her mother’s Facebook page. Find her on Twitter @sheena_rf.
Siqi Liu grew up in Changsha, China and Naperville, Illinois. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and a 2021 Periplus fellow. She graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in History & Literature and is currently based in New York City, where she is working on a short story collection and a novel.
Katie Yee is a Brooklyn-based writer and the Book Marks associate editor at Lit Hub. She is also one of the founding editors of Emergent Literary, a new online journal celebrating Black and brown work. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Epiphany, Catapult, and No Tokens.
Poetry
Lyn Li Che is originally from Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, Tupelo Quarterly, BOAAT, River Styx, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and others. She currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.
Chaelee Dalton (이채연) is the author of the chapbook Mother Tongue (Gold Line Press, forthcoming May 2021). You can find their work published or forthcoming in Pinwheel Journal, Penn Review, and Agave Review. A poet, zine maker, and educator, they have presented their work at arts and activist events in Seoul, Los Angeles, and New York. Born in Uijeongbu, South Korea, they currently live in New York.
Theo LeGro is a Vietnamese-American poet. Their work has appeared in diode, Bodega, Juked, Third Point Press, and elsewhere. They live in Brooklyn.
2021 Finalists:
Creative Nonfiction:
Shivani Radhakrishnan
Ying Yu Situ
Pritha RaySircar
Fiction:
Melody Stein
Nicole Zhu
saahil m
Poetry:
Melissa Ho
Sarah Rohani Drepaul
Kimberly Nguyen
Kundiman’s Mentorship Lab is made possible with support from The Jerome Foundation.