VMI 2022 Fellows Announced
We are delighted to welcome two Fellows for the 2022 season to work with director Elee Kraljii Gardiner. Congratulations to Brandon Wint and Olajide Salawu!
VMI is pleased to offer these two Fellowships in the second year of this developing and important program. We received applications from a wide pool of talented and committed authors seeking mentorship for their works-in-progress. We thank each person who applied and want to state what a pleasure it was to spend time with the submissions. We are encouraged to know how much fine work is taking place all around us, both in Canada and internationally. The abundant interest confirms our efforts to support authors at all stages of their careers.
Meet the Fellows:
Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy, devastation, and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violent futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.
Olajide Salawu is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland published under African Poetry Book Fund, edited by Kwame Dawes. His works have appeared and are forthcoming in The Journal, Oxford Review of Books, Rattle, The Offing, Saraba Magazine, Lolwe, Glass, and Obsidian Literary Magazine. He is also a PhD student at the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research interests include, rurality, urbanity, African cyber poetry experience, digital humor, African films and Nigerian book culture. His research works have appeared in such publications as Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Third Text.
Brandon and Olajide will work independently on their poetry projects as members of the 2022 cohort in the Six-Month Intensive. We invite everyone to attend their public reading to be held in June.
The Fellowship program will continue next year with an invitation for applications in the fall for the 2023 season. Please follow vancouvermanuscriptintensive.com for more info and consider donating in support of the Fellowship program!