Minnesota State Write Like Us seeks students with an interest in creative writing who identify as Black, Indigenous, or persons of color (BIPOC) for twenty mentee scholarships.
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 and 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.
Write Like Us author-mentors will visit creative writing classrooms at each of the five participating colleges during fall and spring semesters of 2022-2023 and will work individually with scholarship mentees from each of the five campuses (twenty total) throughout the academic year. Additional programming will be announced as appropriate.
For more information, contact Brian.Baumgart@nhcc.edu.
Write Like Us Local Author-Mentors
Write Like Us author-mentors will visit creative writing classrooms at each of the five participating colleges during fall and spring semesters of 2022-2023 and will work individually with scholarship mentees from each of the five campuses (twenty total) throughout the academic year. Additional programming will be announced as appropriate.
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.
Bio
Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael's essay "There was a Tremendous Softness" is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed Editions, Feb. 2023).
Bio
Nicola Koh is a Malaysian Eurasian 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.
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 on her website.
Write Like Us Mentees
Five of 20 fellowships were awarded to North Hennepin Community College students to work with local author-mentors in year-long residencies.
The 2022-23 Write Like Us Fellowship Winners are:
Winnie Godi was born in Kampala, Uganda and raised in Rochester, MN. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Augsburg University in International Relations and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies with a minor in Peace and Global Studies. She has worked in education for the last seven years in many roles including as an Equity Specialist in Rochester, an African History and Geography Teaching Fellow in Gaborone, Botswana, and a Kindergarten Teacher in Nairobi Kenya. She is currently completing an English Teaching Assistantship with The Fulbright Program in Kigali, Rwanda, where she teaches English comprehension through drama at Apacope School and the U.S. Embassy Rwanda American Center. Winnie is also a student at Rochester Community and Technical College, Anoka-Ramsey, and North-Hennepin community colleges where she is taking classes to expand her knowledge and skills in the fine arts. Her love and passion for acting and storytelling have led her to creative writing. Winnie writes short and flash-fiction stories, poems, essays, song lyrics, and plays. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, art events, cooking, and reading.
Isabella Thoulouis was born and raised in Minnesota. Her core values are diversity, equity, curiosity, learning, and expressiveness. By the age of 17 she had tried six different instruments, eleven sports, thirteen different mediums of art, and seven different types of literary works. She has written fiction, creative nonfiction, manuscripts, poetry, speeches, online works, and single pages of text. Her earliest memories of writing go back to 2012 at the age of 7 in her second-grade classroom where she had to create stories with pictures. In that classroom she fell in love with storytelling and books. Later, writing became her way of communicating to her parents what emotions she found hard to tell. It was then she recognized the magic of the pen and paper.
Kevin Greger Jr. is from Northeast Iowa, and is a member of The Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. Currently, he is completing his associates through North Hennepin Community College for the Creative Writing program. Kevin resides in Buffalo, MN, which has slowly become a new home.
Yer Kasey Vang is a poet, fiction writer, and novelist. Her writing often explores the emotions humans feel throughout their lives such as love, anger, sadness, loneliness, happiness, and grief. Yer is a high-school student at Prairie Seeds Academy, also a full time PSEO student at North Hennepin Community College where she is pursuing an Associate’s degree in Creative Writing. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with both of her parents, her two older brothers, and her older sister, as well as their family Australian Shepherd.
Trei Betow is a trans fiction writer who writes to spread joy. He focuses on ideas that are simply meant to be entertaining but he occasionally delves into his experience as a mixed-race trans man. He’s lived in Minnesota his entire life and is a student at North Hennepin Community College where he is pursuing a writing degree. Trei plans to start publishing novels and short stories sometime in the near future.
Minnesota State Equity 2030
The Minnesota State Write Like Us program in 2022-2023 is funded by a $90,000 Minnesota State Multi-Campus Collaboration grant in support of Minnesota State's Equity 2030 goals, with additional funding support from the participating colleges and independent supporters. 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.
All Write Like Us activities follow Minnesota State guidance and mandates regarding COVID-19 protocol.