Haymarket Books and Mellon Foundation Announce Second Cohort of ‘Writing Freedom’ Fellows

LocationNew York, New York and Chicago, Illinois
Grantmaking areaPresidential Initiatives
DateMarch 25, 2025
M Haymarket 2025

Today, Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation announced a second cohort of the ‘Writing Freedom Fellowship’ – a program created to recognize, support, and elevate the voices of emerging and established writers impacted by the carceral system and working in genres spanning poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Through the fellowship, writers will receive professional development support, opportunities for shared learning, and an award. Launched in 2024, the Writing Freedom Fellowship will be extended for an additional three years with the aim of supporting a total of 100 writers over five years.

The 2025 Writing Freedom Fellows comprises a group of twenty writers at various stages of their literary careers who in their work explore themes ranging from grief and addiction to survivorship, language, and repair. The program is designed to encourage community among writers, to foster their creative practices, and to bring their essential voices and perspectives to broader audiences.

"After I was jailed, after everything was gone, what I had was a community of people who urged me to keep going,” said Starr Davis, 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow. “Becoming a Writing Freedom Fellow helped me write my way back to my daughter.”

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any democratic nation in the world, with a far-reaching carceral system that includes prison and jail, criminalization of immigration, policing and probation, the family policing system, and involuntary commitment. These systems, which disproportionately harm communities of color and those living in poverty, also tend to have a profoundly negative impact on the families and communities of those incarcerated. Writing Freedom seeks to support and elevate the essential voices of writers within these populations, which are both underrepresented in the literary world and often silenced by the carceral system.

“This second iteration of the Writing Freedom Fellowship recognizes the profound literary contributions and broad presence of writers impacted by carceral systems and spaces,” said Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. “We are honored to support the continued development of these Fellows’ work and artistry, and to foster greater community among them as they advance in their craft and careers."

“We couldn’t have entirely imagined all that would grow from this initiative,” said Haymarket Books Program Manager Jyothi Natarajan. “We’ve been able to witness connections unfold that continue to strengthen our commitment to supporting writers who have been touched by the carceral system. We’re thrilled by the continuation of this project and the renewal of funding, which will allow us to expand support to 100 writers across five years.”

Following a multi-step nomination and review process, the 2025 Writing Freedom Fellows were selected by a group of five esteemed writers: Guggenheim Award-winning novelist Chris Abani, journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Keri Blakinger, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning fiction writer Deesha Philyaw, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize–winning poet Patricia Smith, and award-winning poet and memoirist Javier Zamora. Members of the fellowship’s advisory board include Lawrence Bartley, Tayari Jones, Rachel Kushner, Romarilyn Ralston, and Christopher Soto.

“We are all witnesses; however, many seek to control exactly what it is we see and how what we see reaches our bodies and hearts,” said nationally acclaimed poet and performer Patricia Smith, a member of the 2025 Writing Freedom Selection Committee. “My role on the Writing Freedom selection committee linked me inextricably with the voices and viewpoints of those forever in the process of being disappeared. I was amazed by the resilience, detail, music, and fervor in this work.”

2025 Writing Freedom Fellows

  • Ra Avis (she/her) is a memoirist who in her work navigates the deeply personal intersections of grief, incarceration, and disability. She writes regularly at Rarasaur.com. Avis, based in California, is currently at work on Kites Library, an incarceration-centered zine archive.
  • B Batchelor (he/him) is a poet and artist based in Minnesota. His poetry has appeared in the Nation, Columbia Journal, and Duende. He has won multiple awards from PEN America and was a 2022 finalist for the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. His chapbook, Disfigured Hours, is forthcoming from Rain Light Press in 2025.
  • Jeremiah Bourgeois (he/him) is a nonfiction and legal writer whose work focuses on sentencing and corrections. He authored The Extraordinary Ordinary Prisoner: Essays From Inside America’s Carceral State. His scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of Criminal Law and the Seattle Journal for Social Justice.
  • Dante Clark (he/they) is a poet and performer from the Bronx, NY. Clark explores, through writing poems, the scope and sound of words that inform, delight, and incite toward liberation. He is currently a Goldwater Fellow at New York University’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.
  • Ajanaé Dawkins (she/her) is a poet, conceptual artist, and theologian. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, is forthcoming. Dawkins cohosts the VS Podcast at the Poetry Foundation. She is writing a manuscript exploring the 1990’s disappearance of her great aunt.
  • Curtis Dawkins (he/him) is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of short stories The Graybar Hotel (2017). He is currently at work on a novel.
  • Emile Suotonye DeWeaver (he/him) is a formerly incarcerated activist and writer, and the author of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine (2025). He’s a 2022 Soros Justice fellow, a Center for Just Journalism fellow, and a 2021 Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize winner. His work has been published widely, including in the San Francisco Chronicle, Colorlines, and Truthout.
  • Michael Fischer (he/him) is a nonfiction writer and storyteller. In his writing he interrogates the ways in which ecological justice can play a role in dismantling the carceral state. Fischer works at the Center for Justice & Economic Advancement. His writing appears in the New York Times, the Sun magazine, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, and elsewhere.
  • Joe Garcia (he/him) currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a reporter for the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. His work has been published in the Sacramento Bee, Alta Journal, MIT Technology Review, Washington Post, and the New Yorker.
  • torrin a. greathouse (she/they) is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She is the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and DEED, a 2025 Stonewall Book Award recipient. They teach at Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop.
  • Elizabeth Hawes (she/her) writes prose, plays, and poetry. The recipient of a 2023 Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize with the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and multiple PEN America Writing Awards, her recent work can be found in Defector, Lux, Prism, black lipstick, The Rumpus, and Santa Clara Review.
  • Faylita Hicks (they/them) is the author of A Map of My Want (2024) and HoodWitch (2019). Based in Chicago, they are currently working on a debut memoir-in-essays about their incarceration, A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of An American Poet (2026). Hicks is a Right of Return fellow and the winner of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Award.
  • Monterica Sadé Neil (she/her) received her MFA from Louisiana State University. She’s been a Tin House Scholar and a Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University. Her writing has appeared in the Offing, the nonprofit news organization MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and more. She’s currently at work on a memoir.
  • Geneva Phillips (she/her) is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Raised and incarcerated in Oklahoma, she is the author of the memoir Disappearing in Glimpses. Her writing has been honored and included in four published PEN America Prison Writing Awards anthologies.
  • Janel Pineda (she/her) is a U.S. Salvadoran poet and the author of Lineage of Rain (2021). Pineda is currently pursuing a PhD at UCLA, where her research explores the liberatory capacities of poetry for Central Americans.
  • Julie Poole (she/her) is a writer based in Austin. She has published two books of poetry, Bright Specimen and Gorgeous Freak. Her essays and journalism can be found in the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Bon Appétit, HuffPost, the Baffler, Slate, and the Nation. She is currently working on a memoir.
  • Nicole Shawan Junior (they/she) is a creative nonfiction and speculative fiction writer. They are a Tin House "Debut Author Over 40" residency recipient, Hedgebrook writer-in-residence, Lambda Literary Emerging Queer Voice, New York Foundation for the Arts Geri Ashur Fellow, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference contributing writer.
  • Carla J. Simmons (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer who has been incarcerated in the American South since 2004. She critically examines the roles of imperialism, capitalism, racism, poverty, and class in the carceral system. Her work has been featured in Lux, Prism, and The Appeal. She is currently completing a memoir.
  • Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant writer-performer from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas. Their poems have been featured in Here to Stay, Somewhere We Are Human, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, as well as New Republic, Tin House, [PANK], the Slowdown podcast, and Code Switch.
  • Anonymous (they/them) is a writer of prose, poetry, and hybrid works. They are the author of multiple chapbooks that establish a language that is visual and aural as much as it is written. Their writing was published in the anthology Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex.

Building on a legacy of scholarship and cultural production, Mellon’s Imagining Freedom initiative supports artistic and humanistic work that centers the voices and knowledge of people who have experienced the impacts of incarceration. The initiative aims to interrupt the harmful narratives that uphold the carceral system and counteract its most enduring, least visible impacts. To date, the initiative has made more than 70 grants totaling more than $98 million.

Haymarket Books continues to deepen its commitment to supporting incarcerated readers and writers and to abolitionist politics—whether through building space for political education and programming centering decarceration; donating books to incarcerated readers through Haymarket’s Books Not Bars program; cultivating authors who are currently incarcerated; and most recently with the Writing Freedom Fellowship.

For more information about the Writing Freedom Fellowship, please contact writingfreedom@haymarketbooks.org.

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About Haymarket Books

Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago with a mission to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. Haymarket strives to make their books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, and internationalist Left. Connect with Haymarket Books on Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube. Learn more at haymarketbooks.org

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty and empowerment that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and guided by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

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