Trillium Arts is delighted to announce Catina Bacote of New Haven, Connecticut as the 2023 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 38 competitive applications that were received from around the country in the genres of non-fiction, biographies and memoirs. The panel ultimately awarded the Fellowship to Ms. Bacote for the 2023 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.
Catina Bacote, 2023 “Miss Sarah” Fellowship Awardee
About the “Miss Sarah” Fellowship Awardee:
Catina Bacote is a nonfiction writer from New Haven, Connecticut, and her current book project chronicles the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on families and communities. She is a 2021-23 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2021-22 American Association of University Women Fellow. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, as well as in the literary journals Ploughshares, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Kweli, The Common, December Magazine, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, Fourth Genre, and The Southern California Review. Her work has been supported by writing residencies such as Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Blue Mountain, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony, Kimmel Nelson Harding Center, Djerassi, Willapa Bay Air, Brush Creek, and Ragdale, where she received the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship. Bacote holds an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a Dean’s Research Fellow and subsequently served as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
During Ms. Bacote's "Miss Sarah" Fellowship, she plans to work on her manuscript, Eastern Circle: A True Story of Family, Community, and a Drug Epidemic, which draws on private and public history to reveal the lasting impact of the drug crisis on families and communities. The project shares the intimate stories of people irrevocably changed by the illegal drug trade, gun violence, and the carceral state. These first-hand accounts consider what it means to make choices within the constraints of oppressive racial and economic systems.
About the Review Panelists
Trudier Harris is University Distinguished Research Professor of English Emerita, the University of Alabama, and J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, UNC Chapel Hill. She has authored and edited twenty-six volumes, among which are Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Saints, Sinners Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, Depictions of Home in African American Literature, and her award-winning memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South. On 10 March 2023, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Her latest book is Bigger Thomas: A Literary Life, which is forthcoming in 2024.
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist/scholar/facilitator who employs Black Feminist principles and theatrical jazz aesthetics in her work. Her original performances include sista docta, a critique of academic life, and Searching for Ọ̀ṣun, an ethnographic performance installation around the Divinity of the River. Her most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, a collaborative ethnography focusing on three theatrical jazz practitioners. Omi is Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
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.