Samantha Stevens
Trillium Arts is delighted to announce Samantha Stevens of Oakland, CA as the 2025 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 42 competitive applications that were received from around the country in the genre of Poetry. The panel ultimately awarded the Fellowship to Samantha for the 2025 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.
About The “Miss Sarah” Fellowship Awardee
Samantha Stevens (she/they) is a queer, Black, disabled writer and educator from the East Coast, Lenni-Lenape land. They are a graduate of the MFA in Poetry at the University of San Francisco and have received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, Esperimento Sul Respiro, The Ruby, and Kearny Street Workshop. They are the recipient of the 2022 Deathrattle/Oroboro Penrose Poetry Prize. Their work is also featured in Fruitslice and forthcoming in Foglifter and The Seventh Wave. They are working on their first manuscript, Rituals for the Living, and offer sessions for healing and collective liberation integrating poetry, ritual, movement, and meditation.
Fellowship Plans
During my residency, I will immerse myself in the practice of ritual as both a creative and healing process. As I refine my first poetry manuscript, Rituals for the Living, which maps my survival against illness, loss, and the impact of harmful systems, I will engage in daily rituals—combining tarot, journaling, yoga, and time in nature—to deepen my connection to these themes. I hope to explore and offer rituals centered on grief, embodiment, ancestral lineage, joy, rest, and protection. Through this embodied practice, I will write new poems and create a companion book of mini rituals, making my writing not just a personal process but an invitation to collective practice and a space of radical possibility.
About The Review Panelists
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D, is Founding Director of the Women's Research & Resource Center at Spelman College and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies. She is past president of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also edited Words Of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought and co-authored with Johnnetta B. Cole Gender Talk: The Struggle For Women's Equality In African American Communities.
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.