Announcing the 2022 Writing Fellows

We are thrilled to announce the 2022 A Public Space Writing Fellows.

Indya Finch is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, and Sam Houston State University. She's also received the Meta and George Rosenberg Writers Room Fellowship for screenwriting and support from the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. Her work has appeared in Oxford American. She lives in Iowa City where she is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Indya says: "The characters in 'Shotgun Calypso' have been with me for years; it's the first short story I ever wrote. So I'm excited that through this fellowship they can be shared, and others can come to love them the way I have. I'm also really excited to be more a part of the literary community and meet people who are as excited about literature as I am."

We’d all but cover our noses with our T-shirts because Ma didn’t like to roll the windows down when Lonnie rode with us. She said it’d be a waste of her perfume, the one she got at the dollar store. And even though that sugary cotton candy scent clawed at her throat and made her sneeze three times when she sprayed it, what a waste it would be if he didn’t notice she had it on.

Vivian Hu is a writer and cellist from Texas. Her work can be found in Narrative, Triangle House Review, and elsewhere. She completed her MFA at Cornell University, where she currently teaches undergraduate creative writing. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Vivian says: "A Public Space has long been one of my favorite literary magazines, publishing some of the writers and stories I hold dearest to my heart. I feel so lucky to be joining this community of sincere readers and writers—a place where I’ll find much-longed-for space, nourishment, and guidance to prepare my story for publication and further develop my current novel project, from which this story is excerpted."

The food awakens something in me, an old hunger, and I am afraid then, of how much I want and how badly I need. I finish everything in front of me, then look up at my children, who are still working on their plates. “Are we still hungry?” I ask. “Do we need to get more?” Already, I’m envisioning fat steak between my teeth, crusty bread dipped in its juice.

Kristin Keegan lives in northern California. Her poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including the California Quarterly, the Southwest Review, Sacred Journey, and Plainsong. She began writing fiction a few years ago and recently completed a draft of a historical novel set in San Francisco in 1906. She's at work on a series of short stories.

Kristin says: "I’m grateful to A Public Space for acknowledging and supporting my writing with this Fellowship. I look forward to working with an editor to delve more deeply into the craft of fiction writing."

A German boyfriend I had decades ago, an arborist, told me that Italian cypresses reminded him of exclamation points, an image I enjoyed at the time and have continued to savor since. Cypresses often appear in cemeteries—well, hardly appear, as they have been purposefully planted to form a boundary, just as they do in this neighborhood. I’ve thought about Fritz’s (not his real name) image: exclaiming cypresses! In cemeteries. Not much exclaims in a cemetery—this treespeak could be a message for the living that shouldn’t go unheeded.

To learn more about the Writing Fellowship at A Public Space, visit our Fellowships page.