Announcing the Third Annual FSG Writer’s Fellowship Winner

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is pleased to announce that the third FSG Writer’s Fellowship has been awarded to María José Candela. This year’s judges—Hanif Abdurraqib, Maya Binyam, and Shane McCrae—nominated a group of five finalists, from which an in-house committee selected María José.

Mitzi Angel, president and publisher of FSG, says, “María José Candela writes into and against the magical realist tradition—to astonishing effect. Her stories are funny, lively, and poignant; they summon up, with imaginative precision, feelings of dislocation and alienation across geographic and psychic space. FSG is delighted to support her as she embarks on the first steps of a major 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. It includes a $15,000 award.

The Fellowship celebrates the spirit of the FSG publishing list and its commitment to invention, curiosity, and extending the limits of literature. It also aims to provide an introduction to the publishing industry through FSG and its networks. Candela’s Fellowship will begin in January 2025.

The FSG Writer’s Fellowship is an ongoing program and will continue next year when we open submissions for the 2026 FSG Fellow.

Fellow

María José Candela

María José Candela is a writer from Colombia. Selected as the runner-up for the 2022 Sewanee Review Fiction Prize and the winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Fiction Prize, her fiction has also appeared in the Kenyon Review. Her nonfiction has been published by Roxane Gay. She holds a B.A. from Vassar College, an M.F.A. from Florida State University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Spanish Literature at Georgetown University. She is working on her first book.

Finalists

Amanda Mei Kim

Amanda Mei Kim is a Japanese and Korean American writer, who grew up on a tenant farm in California. She writes about collective power, cultural knowledge, and nature in rural communities of color. She is a Narrative Initiative Changemaker Author, a Steinbeck Fellow and a Granum Foundation finalist. Her writing has appeared in New York Times, Brick, LitHub, [PANK], Discover Nikkei, Eastwind Magazine, Tayo Literary Magazine, and Nonwhite and Woman, an anthology of BIPOC women writers. Five poems are forthcoming in an anthology of Japanese American incarceration poetry from Haymarket Press. She is the founder of Kanshahistory.org, a community history project that is transcribing the property records of 6,000 Japanese Americans who lost their farms during World War II.

Dominica Phetteplace

Dominica Phetteplace is a writer and math tutor. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Copper Nickel, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, Zyzzyva, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship and support from MacDowell, Tin House and Djerassi.

Cassandra Quayson

Cassandra Quayson is a Ghanaian American writer and graduate of the New York University MFA Program, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is a Writing Consultant at the Columbia School of Social Work and the 2024 Poetry Coalition Fellow at Urban Word NYC and the National Youth Poet Laureate Program. Her writing, which is informed by love, abolition, and her studies in sociolinguistics, can be found in West 10th, Confluence, and The Gallatin Review.

Katana Smith

Katana Smith is a poet from Aurora, Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, RHINO poetry, and other publications. Katana earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the Litowitz graduate program at Northwestern University. She is a McNair Scholar and a graduate of the creative writing program at Knox College. She currently serves as a reader for Callaloo. Katana is at work on her first full-length collection of poetry. She lives in Chicago with her partner.

Judges

Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant. He is the author of There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which was longlisted for the National Book Award; A Little Devil in America, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award; They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, named one of the books of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, and others; and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, which was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Maya Binyam

Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. She is the winner of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Literature at Claremont McKenna College and an advisory editor at the Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize; The Many Hundreds of the Scent; and the forthcoming New and Collected Hell. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.