Announcing the Inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship Winner

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is proud to announce that the inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship has been awarded to the New Orleans–based writer Addie Citchens.

FSG announced the creation of the Writer’s Fellowship on March 22 of this year. Applicants were asked to submit a writing sample and a personal statement. In an identity-hidden submission process, each of the initial writing samples was read by at least two members of the FSG community, across all publishing departments, over the course of two months. In June, the top 30 submissions and their respective personal statements were sent to the three Fellowship judges—Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips—who selected the five finalists in July. A small group of FSG staff then read these five writing samples and personal statements, and interviewed each finalist. The group conferred and made a recommendation for the winner to FSG’s publisher, Mitzi Angel.

Mitzi Angel, president and publisher of FSG, says, “I’m delighted to announce the winner of the FSG Writer’s Fellowship, a program that expresses our longtime commitment to publishing exciting new voices. I look forward to welcoming Addie Citchens to FSG. Citchens’s remarkable imagination gives rise to prose of an unusual focus and fullness. It embodies the qualities and spirit that FSG holds to in its search for the best and liveliest new writing.”

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, Citchens’s work will be featured in the FSG newsletter Work in Progress, and FSG will organize a public reading of Citchens’s writing. The Fellowship also aims to provide mentorship and an introduction to the publishing industry through FSG and its networks, including mentorship from Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Citchens’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 2023 FSG Fellow.

Fellow

Addie Citchens

Addie Citchens is a New Orleans-based writer. Citchens, a graduate of Jackson State University, studied at the Florida State Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her writing, which examines themes such as Black womanhood, the blues, and the South, has appeared in Oxford American: The Best of the South, Midnight & Indigo’s speculative fiction anthology, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and Columbia Journal. She was born and raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Finalists

Bianca Asare

Bianca Asare is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Bergen County, New Jersey, she is the daughter of two immigrants. Her novel in progress, Eighth Avenue Line, was her undergraduate senior project at Bard College, where it received an honors distinction from the literature department. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Min Li Chan

Min Li Chan is an essayist and a technologist living in Oakland, California. Her writing can be found in The Yale Review, The Point magazine, and BuzzFeed, among other places, and has been supported by the BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellowship, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from Northwestern University. She was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Peter Zaragoza Mayshle

Peter Zaragoza Mayshle received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his writing has been supported by a residency at Yaddo. His short stories have appeared in publications across the United States, the Philippines, Canada, and the U.K., including, most recently, in Flash Fiction International, published by W. W. Norton. A two-time finalist for the David T.K. Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, he was born and raised in Manila, and now lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dominica Phetteplace

Dominica Phetteplace is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Wigleaf, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best Microfiction 2019. Born in Berkeley, California, she continues to live in the San Francisco Bay Area.