The Recipients and Advisor A.J. Verdelle Reflect on the Program’s Inaugural Year

A.J. Verdelle | September 2023

2023 AWP HBCU Fellowship Members

The official launch of the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program took place at the AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, Washington, March 8–11, 2023. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, AWP awarded fellowships to two faculty and four students from Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) across the country. These fellowships included conference registration, travel, and lodging costs, as well as honoraria. 

At the helm of this new program was our selected creative advisor, A.J. Verdelle, HBCU professor (Morgan State University) and award-winning author of The Good Negress and Miss Chloe: A Memoir of Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison. In addition to hosting a public lecture on recognizing Black genius, Verdelle guided students and faculty in a private discussion for the fellows on how to further support creative writing and paths to publishing at HBCUs. Both faculty fellows would go on to mentor two student fellows each, establishing supportive relationships set to continue long after the conference. 

The goal of the new program is to recognize the work that HBCU faculty and students are already doing to promote creative writing at their institutions and to provide a space for HBCUs within AWP. The first year of the program, however, proved to be much more than recognition. A new community has been created and will need to be nurtured with commitment and creativity. What began as a seed of an idea was realized thanks to the enthusiastic participation of the inaugural creative advisor and fellows and was further strengthened by the celebration of the program’s supporters. Below are words of reflection from all of the participants of the first year of the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program. 

A.J. Verdelle 

In Seattle last month, AWP erected its trademark pop-up, a veritable literary city, demonstrating magic and extreme organization. Somebody write a story about all those moving parts! 

The AWP annual conference returned in full force after a few tumultuous pandemic years, and again, engaged writers at all stages of the pipeline: from learning to publishing, from prizes to permanence. More than 9,000 people attended this year. That number—9,000—could be equal to or bigger than many historically Black colleges and universities: campuses that have survived into the twenty-first century, and which were, during this nation’s segregated history, the only option for higher education in America—for African Americans who had the mettle, the mental capacity, and the material wealth to finish high school, and dare to continue to study. 

In 2023, 105 HBCUs remain in the United States, continuing an educational tradition of faith in our potential, and belief in the importance of accessible, available higher education. Morgan State University in Baltimore, where I teach, is a thriving urban research university that has educated African Americans for 167 continuous years. Zora Neale Hurston attended when we were a smaller school, then named Morgan College. At Morgan State University, we have a PhD program in English, which offers an option to write a creative dissertation, but we do not have an option to earn an MFA along the way. 

When AWP was doing the good work of being more inviting, being more inclusive, and reaching out to HBCUs, AWP found that there were no MFA programs at any of the nation’s HBCUs. 

AWP reached out to me, as a novelist and author of a literary memoir, but most importantly, as creative writing faculty at an HBCU. I was invited to select two HBCU faculty fellows, who showed innovative thinking in creative writing teaching. Selected faculty fellows include Dana Little from University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, and Tommy Mouton from Huston- Tillotson University in Texas. Professors Little and Mouton then selected four HBCU student fellows: Amanda Nwosu and Christen Montgomery from Prairie View University, Ife Olatona from Howard University, and Brianna Yancey from North Carolina A&T. A creative writing alum of Morgan State University traveled with me, adding another student of color to experience the annual convening. Our crew from HBCUs joined in with the many panelists, writers, aspiring writers, teachers, journalists, and students who presented and attended. A main takeaway from the broad, new experience of AWP: A literary life is possible. AWP brings together plenty of people living literary and literary-adjacent lives. For the average writer, the young writer, the person of color who wants to write creatively, who wants to promote lit culture, AWP is like a city on a hill, far away, not yet accessed. There walk the informed, there go the accomplished.

Dana Little

I am assimilation. I am the product of bigotry, sold out of a biological family into the thinner slipstream of a white family. I’ve always felt set aside outside blurred and smeared lines. Knowing I was racially mixed and being adopted and raised by a white family, fitting in relied on shutting down, quieting the tone and register of my voice. Expression, words, clipped and crippled, and sentences limping off half-blind through a dark wood. The yearning, what I needed, was the human need for acceptance into a representative community. 

When I found the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program, knowing I am assimilation with a voice falling out of both sides of my mouth, being chosen for the inaugural cohort led to an immense feeling of acceptance into a community in the process of regrouping. It is an honor to help reimagine and reverse engineer the dismantling of a community as it was assimilated, but it came with an awkward feeling expressed in the question: How can I contribute to this new mission?

During the AWP HBCU Fellowship luncheon, we discussed how the Black community may have lost something through assimilation. While inclusion in the broader community is desirable, it has led to the splintering of the inner group. We wondered how to build community in HBCUs and get students to participate in shared experiences.

Separate but equal is a legacy. Being at the forefront of a new legacy means locating the words that lay out my sense of purpose. It is willful participation. My will sitting cross-legged in meditation and clouded by a thought bubble, a breath, the individual voice made legion. A breath, the voice in literal and metaphoric pulses collected in communion.

Assimilation has benefits and drawbacks, and being chosen to join the broader group is a benefit, but it can also place one on the margin. A.J. Verdelle’s talk, “Standing at the Center and Writing from the Margins: A Lecture,” illustrated how this situation of feeling set apart is not new, as the rebirth of the community split by time and spaced by assimilation has happened many times before, always as the afterbirth from the past bathed in darkness.

As ever, after the darkness comes the dawn. At the luncheon, founder of Serendipity Literary Agency and AWP board advisor of the HBCU Fellowship Program Regina Brooks noted the many paths into various industries available to English majors. We searched for ways to help students relax their eyes and see a full view ahead. The ways assimilation shifts and makes community collateral. The purpose of the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program is to draw in and support students—prove how the use of words that slap and tap, like jump ropes and shoe soles, can Double Dutch you into various fields. 

As a faculty fellow, I chose two outstanding undergraduates from Prairie View A&M University (Amanda Chidinma Nwosu and Christen Montgomery). My purpose rests in mentorship, with co-faculty fellow Tommy Mouton, helping point to a risen wisdom of a fair sun spun from the whimpers of a fallen moon.

Tommy Mouton

A.J. Verdelle has just finished her talk, “Standing at the Center and Writing from the Margins.” I am reinvigorated, proud to be in the midst of such talented thinkers and writers. I’m still in a foggy kind of disbelief that I, Dana Little, and our “hand-picked” student fellows are in Seattle together as inaugural AWP HBCU Fellows.

A few minutes later, high noonish, my student fellows and I are sitting in a surprisingly quiet and, a surprisingly well-lit, Pike Street Cheesecake Factory. I’m sure I joked about the lighting, about how I never enter a Cheesecake Factory without my just-in-case flashlight, as I find their well-researched lighting choices (something about soft lighting piquing our appetites) nauseating and less than romantic.

Before we delve into conversation, I retrieve my stack of folded schedules and itineraries from my blazer’s pocket. I don’t want us to miss or arrive tardy to any of our scheduled events. Perhaps the future of the program is riding, however lightly, on our shoulders.

Between our respective bites, a Glamburger, a Thai lettuce wrap, and an avocado club, we reflect on A.J.’s talk.

“Become what is bubbling up inside of you,” she encouraged us. Words that resonate now just as they did then. 

And that is what I remind my fellows—that it is quite obvious that they have already been bitten by the writer’s bug and that if they really want to write that they should not let anything, especially the money, stand in their way. 

“It’s already bubbled up,” I assure them. “You’re writers now. Too late to turn back.” 

I think they laughed. 

Big-plate stuffed, with at least one of us holding a chic and colorful to-go bag (a kind of purse-in-a-pinch, I’ve coined it), we decide our next move. We still have presentations to attend together, probably the highlight of my contractual obligation as a faculty fellow, my opportunity to tag along to panels of the students’ choosing so that I might get to know them and their writing and reading interests more intimately. Sharing the stage and learning from our students, allowing them to facilitate (Game Recognizing Game as a threshold concept, I’m convinced), is some of the best teaching that we will ever do. (Kudos to the AWP team for including this activity!)

A light drizzle is falling. Brianna and Ife are heading back to the Summit. We confirm which panels, and their times, we’ll meet at next. I decide to head back to my hotel room. I need to see more of Beauford Delaney’s work. During her talk, A.J. shared Mr. Delaney’s portrait of James Baldwin. I had never seen it before. I was deeply moved. 

As I scroll through the images, I feel the joy doing that rising, overflowing thing again. The room’s shades are drawn. But I don’t mind now. I look into the laptop’s screen and devour Delaney’s Scattered Light.

Brianna Yancey

The AWP HBCU Fellowship is a wonderful program for students. It was a pleasure working alongside other students and HBCU faculty. It gave me the opportunity to expand my network and improve my personal development. I learned powerful ways to contribute to my HBCU’s creative writing program. My mentors Tommy Mouton and A.J. Verdelle were instrumental in providing ways that I can help improve my work and my impact on the writing community. I enjoyed going to panels together and digesting what we took away from it together. 

The luncheon gave me an opportunity to discuss concerns and ask for advice. I learned that community isn’t always based on what we have in common but on what we can create and support together. Although writing is something we do alone, our community improves it and holds us accountable. We must ask questions in order to create the community for us. We must ask why we are creating the community and what is it for. I also learned that to affect the broadness that is creative writing we must seek to redefine the granular aspects of the whole. The topics that create creative writing. Being with my mentors and the other student fellows ignited a passion for connecting with community. I also learned about things that are a distraction to the purpose we have as writers and that we must dismiss those distractions before they consume us. The program nurtured my love and confidence in writing back to life.

Amanda Nwosu

My experience at AWP Seattle ‘23 as an HBCU Fellow did exactly what I was hoping for it to do and more. To elaborate, it broadened my horizons as a writer and reader by introducing me to and teaching me things that I did not know prior to attending this convention. Starting with the HBCU Fellowship Program introductory luncheon, it was so great to be in a space of fellow Black writers and professionals who have worked to be at their expert level, where I aspire to get. It was amazing to hear the writing aspirations of my fellow student fellows, and refreshing to hear that I wasn’t the only one who gets stuck reading literary fiction. 

My mentor, Dana Little, was incredibly helpful with the concerns I had about attending grad school for an MFA while working. She also gave Christen and I, her advisees, amazing advice about how to get published as writers. That same day, Dana showed us around the bookfair. Seeing all the different genres of novels, poetry books, and memoirs overwhelmed me with excitement because there was a plethora of booths to visit and learn from. Also, it was really inspiring to see that some of my favorite novels were published through some of the schools that I’m considering attending for my MFA in creative writing. 

The seminars I attended the next day were also amazing. A.J. Verdelle’s advice during her seminar, “Standing at the Center and Writing from the Margins,” helped me deal with and analyze my dreams as a writer, as did Deesha Philyaw during her seminar, “How Writers of Color Use Humor to Tell Their Stories,” when she shared that she writes down funny things she hears in conversation to use for future characters. 

The HBCU Fellowship launch party that followed a few hours later gave me a warm sense of community, and it was nice to network with other writers there. Overall, being part of the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program was an excellent opportunity and experience that I am so grateful for. I’m so excited to see this program’s growth as it continues to provide the great guidance to aspiring writers that it gave me. 

Ife Olatona

My 2023 AWP conference experience nearly didn’t happen. I had known about AWP’s annual writing conference and bookfair for years and hoped to attend someday but didn’t think I’d get a chance yet. Travel expenses as an undergraduate student at Howard further deterred me, until I found out about AWP’s fellowship funding HBCU students and faculty to the conference. I applied at 11:00 p.m. on the day of the deadline, expecting the worst.

Getting the opportunity was affirming because I’d applied to different residencies and summer workshops since I moved to the U.S, but I began to lower my hopes after countless rejections. There were few institutional ecosystems for creative writing when I began writing in Nigeria, despite its plethora of accomplished writers and educators. To carve a burgeoning literary career as a Nigerian is to be defiant, niche-aware, and to a significant extent, know privilege. 

While critics continue to decry a growing Americanization of Nigerian literature, I believe the insightful panels at AWP’s annual conference encourage young Black writers nonetheless, whether from publishing industries like Nigeria’s or America’s.

At AWP, I found a notable community of Nigerian writers, but beyond that a global array of writers and editors committed to the transforming power of literature. It was a pleasure meeting both an agent interested in my debut manuscript in progress and Miya Lee, an editor at the New York Times I’d previously worked with but never physically met. The dinner with the 2023 HBCU fellows and faculty remains memorable, although I was rather shy when Jericho Brown, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, walked up to the table to greet A.J Verdelle and the 2023 fellows. I had many starstruck moments meeting authors I cherished and readers with similar interests despite different backgrounds.

Christen Montgomery

Just one month after complaining about never traveling outside of the South, I received an invitation from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs welcoming me to the 2023 Seattle conference. I was given the privilege of representing my university as a mentee in the launch of the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program. My conference experience was truly motivational and eye-opening. Now, I know that sounds quite cliche, but trust that this is the most fitting description of my Seattle escapade. 

I began the conference by meeting with my mentor, Dana Little, and author A.J. Verdelle. With these writers, I shared some necessary conversations regarding education, community, and exposure. A key concept I gathered from our discussions is that exposure to opportunity is the greatest contributor to success. This fellowship has proven to be a foundation of opportunity for young Black writers such as myself, and I hope that it continues to do so. 

The most monumental lesson I learned during my Seattle trip was to stay true to my artistry. Being exposed to new genres of writing in an assortment of media, as well as writers with differing backgrounds and perspectives enabled me to see the individuality behind every piece of literature. Regina Brooks said to us mentees, “First you have to learn all the rules. Then you can break them.” I’d previously heard this statement from my creative writing professor, Dr. Glenn Shaheen, but the reiteration magnified its impact. Now more than ever, I see the creative thought behind every poem, story, play, script, and paper. I see that while writing has structure and rules, good writers are those who escape conformity and uniformity to instead create pieces of art.