PEN CENTER USA PRESENTS: THE EMERGING VOICES MEET AND GREET

The Emerging Voices Meet and Greet

PEN Center USA will present an informational evening with current and former Emerging Voices fellows and mentors for the benefit of interested applicants. The Emerging Voices Fellowship is a literary mentorship that aims to provide new writers who are isolated from the literary establishment with the tools, skills, and knowledge they need to launch a professional writing career.

Readings/ Fellowship Overview/ Q & A/ Summer Cocktails

Victoria Chang writes poetry and children's books. Her latest poetry book is The Boss, which won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her picture book Is Mommy? was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in southern California with her family. 

Rayne Gasper's work has appeared in The New Statesman, The Adirondack Review, and Word Riot, and has been selected for Long Form Fiction's Pick of The Week.  In 2012, she was named a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Rayne is a Massachusetts native and currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is at work on her debut collection of stories.

Mehnaz Sahibzada was born in Pakistan and raised in Los Angeles. She holds an MA in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara, and she was a 2009 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her poetry chapbooks, Tongue-Tied: A Memoir in Poems (2012) and Summer Forgets to Wear a Petticoat (2016), were published by Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared in publications such as Asia Writes, The Rattling Wall, and Pedestal Magazine.  An English teacher, she lives in southern California.   

Nonfiction writer Sylvia Sukop grew up in rural Pennsylvania and lived in Boston and New York City before settling in Los Angeles. She was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow in 2009, and her work has since been published in the anthologies Emerge (Lambda Literary Foundation, 2016), LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas (Heyday, 2015), and Strange Cargo (PEN Center USA, 2010). She is a 2016 Fellow in NewGround: The Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change, and a longtime volunteer and writing coach for the Posse Foundation. She will be entering the Washington University in St. Louis creative writing MFA program this fall.

For a full list of benefits and application details visit: penusa.org/programs/emerging-voices