Announcing the Second Annual FSG Writer’s Fellowship Winner

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is proud to announce that the second FSG Writer’s Fellowship has been awarded to the Milwaukee, WI-based writer Roland Jackson. This year’s judges—R. O. Kwon, Justin Torres, and Maureen McLane—nominated a group of five finalists, from which an internal steering committee selected Jackson.

Mitzi Angel, president and publisher of FSG, says, “Roland is an unusually elegant and unflinching writer, whose stories— about land, work, race, and power—move in mysterious and surprising ways. From the very first sentences, his voice announced itself as one to listen to, full of flair and moral depth—and we’re thrilled to support him in the early stages of what will surely be a long career.”

This yearlong program is designed to give an emerging writer from an underrepresented community additional resources to build a life around writing: funding, editorial guidance, and advice on how to forge a writing career. The Fellowship celebrates the spirit of the FSG publishing list and its commitment to invention, curiosity, and extending the limits of literature. In addition to a $15,000 award, Jackson’s work will be featured in the FSG newsletter Work in Progress. The Fellowship also aims to provide an introduction to the publishing industry through FSG and its networks, including mentorship from Justin Torres, author of We the Animals and Blackouts. Jackson’s Fellowship will begin in September of this year.

The FSG Writer’s Fellowship is an ongoing program and will continue next year as we open submissions for the 2024-5 FSG Fellow.

Fellow

Roland Jackson

Roland Jackson received his MFA from the University of Montana and is a 2023 fellow with the Periplus Collective. His short stories, “Martial Artists” and “Hunting, Late Season, Bow” can be found in Passages North and Wisconsin People & Ideas, respectively. An arborist by trade, he lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife and kiddo. He is writing his first novel.

Finalists

Erica Frederick

Erica Frederick is a queer, Haitian American writer from Orlando, Florida currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University and writes about being big in all the ways there are to be big—in body, in spirit, in Blackness, in Florida suburbia. She has received fellowships from VIDA, Lambda Literary, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She is well at work on her first novel, Fight in the Night.

Anthony Hudson

Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Siletz) is an artist and writer also known as Portland, Oregon’s premier drag clown Carla Rossi. Anthony’s performance work, from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror, the only LGBTQ horror film and performance series in the country, have earned him national fellowships, international engagements, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Anthony has been published in American Theatre and Arts and International Affairs, and he is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.

Sarina Romero

Sarina Romero is from Oakland, California. Her poems appear in Four Way Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and The Yale Review.

Bradley Trumpfheller

Bradley Trumpfheller is a trans poet and bookseller. Born in occupied Okinawa, they grew up in Virginia, Nevada, and Alabama. They are a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, and they have received support from MacDowell and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The Baffler, The Rumpus, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. They live currently in Austin, Texas.