AWP HBCU Fellowship Program
Thriving undergraduate creative writing programs exist at many historically Black colleges and universities. Through the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program, funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, we seek to uplift the work HBCU faculty are doing to support and establish creative writing programs at their institutions, as well as to provide HBCU students the opportunity to connect with peers from across the country.
To invite strong HBCU participation at the conference and to nurture and encourage new generations of Black writers within the AWP community, we award faculty and student fellowships to attend and participate in every annual AWP Conference & Bookfair. Current fellowships will send fellows to the 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Los Angeles, California!
Meet Our Chosen Creative Advisor
In Los Angeles, faculty and student fellows will have the opportunity to work and speak with our wonderful guest author, Tayari Jones!
New York Times bestselling writer Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read library of classics in 2016.
Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and a Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.
In addition to helping to select the two HBCU faculty fellows, she will also lead multiple events on supporting creative writing endeavors and paths to publishing at HBCUs.
Faculty & Student Fellows
The #AWP25 HBCU Fellowships will be offered to two faculty and four students. The fellowships include the following:
- a $4,000 honorarium for faculty and a $250 stipend for students
- paid travel expenses and lodging for the duration of the conference
- meeting Tayari Jones and attending private group discussions
- a complimentary one-year AWP membership
- publication in the Writer’s Chronicle of an article about each fellow’s #AWP25 experience
#AWP25 faculty and student applications are now closed. Thank you to all who applied!
