Trillium Arts is delighted to announce Julia Mallory of Harrisburg, PA as the 2026 awardee for the “Miss Sarah” Fellowship for Black Women Writers. The Fellowship, named in honor of Sarah M. Johnson of Hickory, NC, aims to provide Black women writers a restful environment conducive to reflection and writing. It also offers uninterrupted time to plant the seed of an idea for a new writing project or to develop or complete a project underway. Learn more about the "Miss Sarah" Fellowship Program.
A panel of esteemed black women writers reviewed 65 competitive applications that were received from around the country in the genre of Fiction. The panel ultimately awarded the Fellowship to Julia for the 2026 cycle. The “Miss Sarah” Fellowship offers a variety of benefits including a $1,000 honorarium, transportation, and accommodations for ten days in July at the Trillium Arts artist residency location in rural Mars Hill, NC and/or at “Montford Manor” in downtown Asheville, NC.
MEET THE AWARDEE
Julia Mallory
Harrisburg, PA
www.blackmermaids.com
www.thejuliamallory.com
Julia Mallory (she/her/they) is a storyteller, whose foundational creative love language is poetry. Julia’s work can be found in A Gathering Together, Barrelhouse, The Offing, Torch Literary Arts, Obsidian, Emergent Literary, Michigan Quarterly Review, So to Speak Journal, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and listed as a Notable Essay and Literary Nonfiction in The Best American Essays.
Julia received the 2022 CUSP Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Mayday Micro-Chapbook Poetry Prize. In addition, she is a Poetry Editor for The Loveliest Review.
Julia is also a visual artist and emerging experimental filmmaker whose work has screened from Toronto to Iceland.
Julia is the mother of three children and is from the Southside of Harrisburg.
FELLOWSHIP PLANS:
Julia will use her time during the fellowship to soothe her nerves and work on her novel, Fasttailed Girls. Set in the late 80s, Fasttailed Girls seeks to confront the lives of Black women who carry the shame of the cultural euphemism, the lives that they build around this mark of waywardness and how they manage to practice compassion with each other even while the world shows them cruelty.
About the review panel
Parneshia Jones is director at Northwestern University Press. She studied creative writing at Chicago State University, earned an MFA from Spalding University, and studied publishing at Yale University. Her first book Vessel (2015) was the winner of the Midwest Book Award and featured in 0, The Oprah Magazine as one of l2 poetry books to savor for National Poetry Month. Her poems have been published in anthologies such as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), Poetry Speaks Who I Am (2010), and She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (2011), edited by Caroline Kennedy. Jones's poems have been featured on Chicago Public Radio, and she is a member of Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Black poets from Appalachia. The recipient of a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, a Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and an Aquarius Press Legacy Award. She served as president of Cave Canem and currently serves on the advisory boards of ShoreFront Legacy, Torch Literary Arts, and Agate Publishing.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of three books: Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She has earned honors from Bread Loaf, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the NEA and others. Originally from Harlem, NY, she is Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
Michelle M. Wright is the College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches courses on the literatures and cultures of the African Diaspora. A Mellon Mays Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Scholar, she is also the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora, published by Duke University Press in 2004, and Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2015. With Jodi Byrd, she is also the co-editor of the Critical Insurgencies and academic book series from Northwestern University Press.