Formed in 2021, Write Like Us is an equity-based creative writing program at five Twin Cities metro-area community colleges: Anoka-Ramsey Community College, Century College, Minneapolis Community, Technical College, Normandale Community College, and North Hennepin Community College. Write Like Us centers and celebrates the work of BIPOC writers and writing students, fostering literary mentorship and leadership as it builds a platform for shared stories, voices, and lived experiences. Century College hopes to increase BIPOC recruitment, retention, and representation in our creative writing certificate program, which has high rates of persistence, graduation, and transfer.
Write Like Us is restructuring its Century College programming to relaunch in the 2024-2025 academic year. Stay tuned for announcements and opportunities to come.
Write Like Us Visiting Author Kiese Laymon Recommends Studying Creative Writing at Minnesota State Community College.
Write Like Us in Conversation with Kiese Laymon
Write Like Us Support
Write Like Us is funded by Minnesota State’s Multi-Campus Collaboration grants supporting Minnesota State’s Equity 2030 goals and a generous donation from Thomson Reuters. Minnesota State is a consortium of thirty state colleges and seven universities in Minnesota. Equity 2030 aims to close the educational equity gaps across race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geographic location by the end of the decade at every Minnesota State college and university. If you wish to donate to the Write Like Us program, please get in touch with writelikeus@minnestate.edu or see https://www.century.edu/giving/ for other giving options.
Write Like Us Archive
2020-2021 Write Like Us National Authors
Hanif Abdurraqib
Bio
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His newest release, A Little Devil In America, was published with Random House in 2021. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Brit Bennett
Bio
When Brit Bennett’s debut novel The Mothers was published in the fall of 2016, she was named a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation and the book was longlisted for the NBCC John Leonard First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half, was a New York Times #1 bestseller and Good Morning America June Book Club pick. The Vanishing Half was longlisted for both the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Before publishing her novels, Bennett had already built an impressive platform as a social commentator. Her essay in Jezebel, following the Ferguson riots, was shared over a million times. Since then she has been invited to write several Op-Eds in the New York Times, and appeared on NPR’s The Brian Lehrer show. Her work has also been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. While an undergraduate at Stanford, she won the Bocock/ Guerard and Robert M. Golden Thesis prizes for her fiction. Earning her MFA at University of Michigan, she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/ Wright Award in College Writing.
Tommy Orange
Bio
Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel There There, a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. There There was one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year, and won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Pen/Hemingway Award. There There was also longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.
Tracy K. Smith
Bio
Tracy K. Smith is the author of The Body’s Question, selected by Kevin Young as winner of the Cave Canem Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. Her second book, Duende, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars. In her memoir, Ordinary Light, Smith explores her own experience of race, religion, and the death of her mother shortly after Smith graduated from Harvard. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, and named a Notable Book by both the New York Times and Washington Post. In 2021 she edited, with John Freeman, the prose anthology There’s A Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Smith’s fourth book of poems, Wade in the Water, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its examination of the grave contradictions tied up in America’s history. Her most recent book is Such Color: New and Selected Poems. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States, during which time she traveled across America, hosting poetry readings and conversations in rural communities. She edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time during her laureateship. Smith is Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
2020-2021 Write Like Us Local Author-Mentors
Merle Geode
Bio
Merle Geode is a mixed race (Korean and white) disabled genderfluid poet/writer, shamanic practitioner, and multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis living with metastatic breast cancer. They have a B.S. degree in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where they were a UW-Madison Writing Fellow. They were a food and features writer for several years for Isthmus and Our Lives Magazine in Madison, but their storytelling is now taking a turn for more experimental and expansive forms. They are currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Their poems and essays appear in Love, Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge and Resilience; MNArtists; and poetry.onl. Currently, they are working on a picture book about anticipatory grief and death as an author/illustrator. They are a former journalist, fine dining cook, and dog groomer who has discovered, during the pandemic, that they actually like to garden.
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Bio
Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His essay, “On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy,” is included in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.
Rosetta Peters
Bio
Rosetta Peters is a poet, an author, a public speaker, and an activist. She is of Yankton, Crow Creek, and Oglala descent. A procrastinator to the point of detriment and lover of the natural world. Rosetta has had her poetry published in the Yellow Medicine Review and has recently been awarded the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant 2021 to professionally record and release an album of her Spoken Word/Performance Poetry and the MRAC Next Step Grant 2021/2022 for creative support for the completion of her memoir titled, The Spider and The Rose.
Sagirah Shahid
Bio
Sagirah Shahid is a Black American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performance artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Loft Literary Center, the Twin Cities Media Alliance, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art. Sagirah is a teaching-writer with Unrestricted Interest, a writing program and consultancy dedicated to supporting neurodiverse learners through creative writing. Her debut collection of poetry Surveillance of Joy, is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press. Sagirah’s children’s activity book Get Involved In A Book Club is available for pre-order with Capstone Press.
Saymoukda Vongsay
Bio
Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is a Lao writer. CNN’s “United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell called her work “revolutionary.” Governor Mark Dayton recognized her with a “Lao Artists Heritage Month” Proclamation. She’s a recipient of a Sally Award for Initiative from the Ordway Center for Performing Arts which “recognizes bold new steps and strategic leadership undertaken by an individual … in creating projects or artistic programs never before seen in Minnesota that will have a significant impact on strengthening Minnesota’s artistic/cultural community.” She’s the author of the children’s book When Everything Was Everything and is best known for her award-winning play Kung Fu Zombies Vs Cannibals. Her plays have been presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (NY), Theater Mu (MN), Lower Depth Theater (LA), Asian Improv Arts (IL), and elsewhere. Other awards include grants/fellowships from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Bush Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, MAP Fund, Playwrights’ Center, Forecast Public Art, MRAC, MSAB, and others. Saymoukda is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Theater Mu, a McKnight Foundation Fellow in Community-Engaged Practice Art, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in playwriting.
2021-2022 Write Like Us Scholarship Mentees
Write Like Us mentees, working with the mentors who’ve selected them, immerse themselves in the local literary community, networking with other writers, getting candid academic and career advice, receiving feedback on their creative work, showcasing that creative work, and attending special non-public events with the visiting national authors.
Jenny Cook
Bio
Jenny Blanche Cook enjoys creative nonfiction style story telling. Her pieces can be light hearted and funny, or deep and heavy as her own experiences mash against larger conversations around politics, policy, and social justice. Her goal is not necessarily to change minds, but to soften hearts and minds around those harder stance type of topics.
Paloma Gomez
Bio
Paloma Gonzalez Gomez was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and now resides in Lake Elmo Minnesota. Paloma attended Stillwater Area High School 10th through 11th grade before having to drop out after being diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (“POTS”) . She obtained her GED in 2019 then started attending Century College full time where she is now working toward a Liberal Arts degree and a certificate in Creative Writing. Paloma plans to move to Florida next year to continue her education in Creative writing at Eckerd College and pursue her dream of becoming a published author. Paloma enjoys writing creative nonfiction based on her life experience as a first-generation Mexican American and essays on social issues in the U.S. When she is not busy with school and writing projects, Paloma enjoys spending time hanging out with her family and pets – her husky, Neptune, a black lab named Athena, and Luna the cat.
Chayeng Moua
Bio
Chayeng Moua loves potato chips, it is staple in his adventures and writing. He admires all things knights and magic. A favorite pastime of his is to play the card game “Yu-Gi-Oh”. Although he works full time, he builds his dream of one day mainly writing books. One day, his adventures of delicious potato chips, knights and magic will make it from his desktop folders to the pages of books.
Reynaldo Pena
Bio
Reynaldo Pena is a poet and screenwriter. He was born and raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota and lives in the Greater East Side. His work centers around the experiences of Afro-Latinos. He is also a part of the 2021-2022 fellow of the “write like us” program. Currently in his second year at Century College finishing his degree in Liberal Arts and Science. Previously he has created his own short film with Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio (CLUES).
Nishanth Bryan Peters
Bio
Nishanth Peters is 28 years old and a person on the Autism Spectrum. He is also an aspiring writer working with Merle Geode, on different writing projects, including a novel. He is dedicated to pursuing his craft as a writer, and is thrilled to be a part of the Write Like Us program and hopes to get as much out of it as possible.
Salina Tekle
Bio
Salina Tekle was born in Gary, Indiana, grew up in many areas of the Twin Cities, lived in Oregon for ten years, and now makes her home in Maplewood, Minnesota. She is a Sophomore at Century College, pursuing her Associates degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences and will transfer to Metropolitan State University next year to obtain a B.A. in the Technical Communications and Professional Writing Program. Salina is an essayist and poet. Her writing often focuses on her personal experience as a Black woman in America, her relationship with her parents, or her roles as a wife and mother. She is married and the mother of three children.
Maikao Xiong
Bio
Maikao Xiong is a Hmong American writer from Maplewood, MN. She enjoys watching documentaries about story process, animation process, and character analyses. She was inspired to create joyful, comedic, and light hearted stories that include deep meanings. She is starting to write again after a long time of not writing. She is currently studying psychology, is a Write Like Us mentee, and bakes often while writing short stories.
Chauci Yang
Bio
Chauci Yang is a student at Century College currently aiming for an AA. She writes novels on online platforms, mainly Webnovel and occasionally Wattpad. Chauci writes novels that are more popular with online readers with themes such as Reincarnation, Transmigration, and historical Chinese-influenced timeline stories. She recently signed with Webnovel to have one of her main novels titled Shīzōng featured exclusively on the site. Chauci Yang lives in Minnesota with her family as a college student and writer for Webnovel on the side.
Matthew Yang
Bio
Matthew Yang was born on February 4th, 1999 in St. Paul Minnesota to Hmong parents. For the first four years of his life, he lived in Frogtown where he was enraptured with stories about being a hero. His earliest memory of a heroic story was a Hmong movie series called Nuj Nplhaib thiab Ntxawm, which was the tale of a man on a quest to rescue the woman he loved from a pack of evil shapeshifting tigers. After finishing high school, Matthew spent a year working at a movie theater, then two more working as a wire technician. After spending so much time simply consuming stories, Matthew decided to give himself a chance to actually create them. He enrolled at Century College in the fall of 2020 where he plans to earn his AA Degree and the Creative Writing Certificate. Matthew has written for Century’s news team, The Century Times, and he is currently a Minnesota State Colleges Write Like Us Program Fellow in Creative Writing with a focus on fiction.
Michael Yer Vang
Bio
Michael Yer Vang graduated from Woodbury High School in 2010. He took his first College-level creative writing class in 2021. But had been writing fan fiction for seven years prior to that class. His favorite genre to write is fiction, but he would integrate his real-life experiences into his writing to make it seem as real as he could. He was accepted as a mentee from Century College under Rosetta Peters in the Write Like Us program.
2022-2023 Write Like Us National Authors
Ross Gay
Bio
Ross Gay is interested in joy.
Ross Gay wants to understand joy.
Ross Gay is curious about joy.
Ross Gay studies joy.
Something like that.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.
Shannon Gibney
Bio
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018), young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new book, Botched, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023). She lives in Minneapolis with her family.
Carmen Giménez
Bio
Carmen Giménez has been named Graywolf Press’s new executive director and publisher, succeeding Fiona McCrae, who has just retired after leading the press for 28 years.
Giménez, 51, a queer Latinx poet and editor, holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. She is a professor in the English department at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, where she teaches creative writing in the MFA program.
She was also, until recently, publisher of Noemi Press, which announced on July 5 that Giménez was stepping down 20 years after she and Evan Lavender-Smith founded the press in 2002 with the release of a single chapbook. Noemi’s mission is to promote both emerging voices and established writers with an emphasis on writers from under-represented communities, including women, BIPOC writers, and LGBTQ writers. Noemi Press, a nonprofit organization, now publishes eight books each year in the fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism categories. Its authors have been winners of, and finalists for, such awards as the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Lambda Literary Awards.
Graywolf published Giménez’s most recent collection of poetry, Be Recorder, in 2019. Be Recorder was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN/Open Book Award, the Audré Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Giménez also is the author of five other collections of poetry, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her lyric memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, won an American Book Award.
Besides these and other awards for her writing, honors accorded to Giménez during her career include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2020, along with fellowships from the Guggenheim, Hermitage, and Howard foundations.
Halee Kirkwood
Bio
Halee Kirkwood (they/them) is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. A first generation college student and proud Upward Bound alum, Kirkwood graduated from Northland College in 2015 and earned an MFA from Hamline University in 2019. Other honors include a 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series Fellowship, a 2019 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Teaching Fellowship at Arizona State University, and both Pushcart and Best Of The Net nominations. They recently were award a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Kirkwood is a bookseller at Birchbark Books and teaches an introduction to publishing course at Hamline University, where they work together with undergraduate student writers to create Runestone Journal.
They were a 2022 inaugural IN-NA-PO fellow, 2021 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant Recipient, and recently accepted a spot on the Board of Directors of Trio House Press, where they have worked as an editor on poetry books. Their work can be found at Poem-A-Day, Water~Stone Review, Muzzle Magazine, and others.
Kiese Laymon
Bio
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division. Heavy: An American Memoir, was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times and a best book of 2018 by the Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. Long Division was honored with the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2014, and was shortlisted for a number of other awards, including The Believer Book Award, the Morning News Tournament of Books, and the Ernest J. Gaines Fiction Award. Laymon is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, NPR, Colorlines, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, The Oxford American, Lit Hub, and many others in addition to Gawker. He graduated from Oberlin College and holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University.
Arleta M. Little
Bio
Arleta M. Little joined the Loft Literary Center as executive director in late 2021. Prior, Arleta spent eight years directing the McKnight Artist Fellowships, a nearly $3M program providing unrestricted support for artists and culture bearers across 15 creative disciplines in Minnesota; before that, she served as the executive director of the Givens Foundation for African-American Literature, and she worked for more than 15 years as an organizational development consultant providing strategic planning, program evaluation, and grant writing services to Minnesota organizations. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and psychology from Penn State University, a Master of Social Work from the University of St. Thomas/University of St. Catherine, and a Master of Public Affairs in public and nonprofit leadership and management from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. She serves as a board member for Headwaters Foundation for Justice, TruArtSpeaks, and Common Ground Meditation Center.
Along with her professional titles, Arleta is a poet and writer. Her essay “Life and Death in the North Star State,” published in Water-Stone Review Vol. 24, was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her work is included in We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World; This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year; and Blues Vision: African American Writing From Minnesota. She also collaborated on writing and publishing Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope in the Struggle.
Carmen Maria Machado
Bio
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
Bao Phi
Bio
Bao Phi joined McKnight in August 2022 as an Arts & Culture program officer. In this role, he maintains and develops relationships with grantee partners and intermediary funders, manages significant grant portfolios, and actively collaborates with McKnight programs, investments, and operations teams to advance and strengthen the creativity, power, and leadership of Minnesota’s working artists and culture bearers.
Prior to McKnight, Bao worked as an arts administrator for nearly 23 years at the Loft Literary Center, advancing from receptionist to director of events and awards. He was on the team that helped the Loft earn the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Anti-Racism Award for Equilibrium, a spoken word program. He also managed Mirrors and Windows, a fellowship for mentoring American Indian, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, SWANA, Latinx, and mixed-race writers in the art and business of children’s literature.
As an artist, Bao is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist. Bao is also known for his children’s books. His A Different Pond received six starred reviews and multiple awards, including the Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and other recognitions. He was named by Minneapolis Monthly as Best Author 2016, and the Artist of the Year (2017) and Author of the Year (2018) by City Pages. He is currently on the editing team for a forthcoming anthology of Asian American and Pacific Islander poets in the oral and spoken word traditions. Bao has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Macalester College. Born in Saigon shortly before the mass exodus of his family and many others to the United States, Bao is a Vietnamese American raised in the Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis. He currently lives in Minneapolis with his child and their cat.
2022-2023 Write Like Us Local Author-Mentors
LM (Lisa Marie) Brimmer
Bio
LM Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MNHS Press 2019), their essays and poetry have appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, The Public Art Review, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, The B’K’, Quarterly West, Voicemail Poems elsewhere. They attend the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. https://lisamariebrimmer.com/
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Bio
Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His essay, “On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy,” is included in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.
Nicola Koh
Bio
Nicola Koh is a Malaysian Eurasian with 15 years in the American Midwest, a Protestant seminary-trained atheist, and a minor god in Tetris. They are a Twin Cities-based freelance editor and teacher, most recently as a Loft Teaching Artist and an instructor at Hamline University. They received their MFA from Hamline and were a fellow for the 2018 VONA/Voices Workshop and the 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series. Their stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in places like Southwest Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Brown Orient, and is forthcoming in Margins. In their free time they undertake a menagerie of projects, take too many pictures of their animals, and craft puns. nicolakoh.com
Taiwana Shambley
Bio
Taiwana Shambley (she/her) is a freelance fiction writer, editor, teaching artist, & abolitionist from Saint Paul, living in South Minneapolis. She works to imagine and practice liberation for BIPOC youth in Minnesota. Currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Warren Wilson College, Taiwana is a 2021 graduate of Augsburg University in English and African American Studies. She was awarded a 2022 grant from the University of Minnesota’s Center of Urban & Regional Affairs to lead the editing of a collection of stories by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth in Minneapolis. Her fiction has won a 2020 Next Step Fund grant by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and she has prose poems published by the Academy of American Poets and Belt Publishing. She is currently entering year five of a first novel. You can find Taiwana’s writing and learn more about how to support her work at taiwanashambley.com.
2022-2023 Write Like Us Scholarship Mentees
Write Like Us mentees, working with the mentors who’ve selected them, immerse themselves in the local literary community, networking with other writers, getting candid academic and career advice, receiving feedback on their creative work, showcasing that creative work, and attending special non-public events with the visiting national authors.
Kiarra Ballard
Brian Kayega
Bio
Brian Kayega is a fiction writer from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He often writes absurd fiction centering around themes of hope, despair, and finding purpose. Brian is a student at Century College majoring in Computer Information Systems and pursuing a Certificate in Creative Writing. After graduating from Century, he plans to continue his studies at a four-year university. When he isn’t writing and studying, Brian reads “peak fiction” such as chainsaw man, focuses on self-improvement, and plays Monopoly (very competitively).
Ofelia Louise Pineda
Sophia Tatge
Bio
Sophia Tatge is an Ethiopian-American fiction writer from White Bear Lake, MN. She is a film enthusiast and is particularly a fan of the horror genre. While her work is mostly comprised of themes like identity, sexuality, and race, she explores them across many forms of writing, including prose, poetry, and screenplays.
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