Getting to Know the 2024 Fellows

Introduction

In the summer of 2024, Crystal Carrazco assisted the Poetry Foundation’s grants and awards team as an intern through the University of Chicago's Masters of Arts in Humanities Program (MAPH), which supports summer internships at institutions in the Chicago region.

Crystal interviewed the 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellows to capture their reflections on receiving the fellowship and provide insight into their lives, inspirations, and writing processes as young poets. 

The condensed interviews that follow were conducted by Crystal Carrazco in August 2024.

Rob Macaisa Colgate

Rob Macaisa Colgate’s work focuses on disabled people. Colgate shares, “I’m doing it to espouse the joy of disabled living. My poetics are very much one of celebration, like ‘Oh my god, it’s actually so fabulous to be disabled, to be in the disability community, and have friends, family, and partners who uplift your disability as a core part of you.’”

Colgate earned an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He didn’t have a robust disability community while there, so he began searching for fellowships that would take him to Toronto, Canada, a location that came up frequently in his disability studies. While he has built a community in Toronto, in 2024 he relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where he has family. 

“Poetry can create an understanding of whatever we’re writing about. Of disability. Of how to live disabled joyfully. And those are understandings we could not have gotten any other way but through the act of writing and reading a poem,” Colgate says. 

Marissa Davis

Marissa Davis just moved to Paris, France, for graduate school. Originally from Kentucky, she had been living in Brooklyn, where she moved when she started her MFA at New York University. She is excited to be in a new location, and she looks forward to reading and writing more within and outside of her translation studies.

While in high school, Davis was selected to participate in Kentucky’s Governor’s School for the Arts for her creative writing. All three of her professors for the three-week program were Affrilachian Poets who assigned readings of poets she’d never encountered before and was unlikely to encounter in a traditional classroom setting. “This is where I got into contemporary poetry in a real way,” she says. 

Davis’s craft continued growing from there, but she is slightly embarrassed that she published her first piece in a publication at her college anonymously. She now laughs about it and has advice for a younger version of herself and other young poets: “It’s okay to be vulnerable, and that vulnerability will be returned by others.”

Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras

Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras writes about her life in Fresno, California, where the people, landscape, and politics influence and shape her writing. “The poets in Fresno, they just push boundaries,” she says of her collaborators and community. “It’s almost as if we’re pushing each other, and they have always pushed me to be better,” Monjaras says. She also jokingly adds, “They don’t sugarcoat anything!”

Monjaras got into poetry when a friend convinced her to take classes at the local community college; she eventually enrolled in a poetry class. “That was the only thing that didn’t bore me,” she says. Her poetry professor encouraged her to continue writing poetry. “I think just one little encouragement by someone can make a huge difference because after that I was like, ‘I can do this. I can write poetry.’” 

When she transferred to California State University, Fresno, Monjaras found a community and mentorship through poets, including Anthony Cody, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Mai Der Vang, of whom she says, “It’s through them that a lot of my poetry has been shaped.”

Chandanie Somwaru

Chandanie Somwaru is working on a manuscript of transnational Indo-Caribbean women’s experiences. “I think about the ancestral lineage of violence, religious dominance, and colonialism. How do we break out of that?” she asks. She’s also working on a project about Hinduism and goddesses, asking, “How do we worship in the Caribbean?” Both projects are closely related.

Somwaru describes herself as a butterfly going from pot to pot gathering new ideas. She didn’t start writing poetry until college, where she took a course taught by Grace Schulman, who said to her, “Your writing is beautiful, but you’re skirting around something. What do you want to say?” That shocked Somwaru, who hadn’t realized she was holding back. Writing poetry then became a healing experience. “Every time I want to give up, poetry comes back and is like,’ I’ve got you,’” she reflects.

Adding some words of wisdom for her younger self and others who want to become poets, Somwaru says, “Just because people don’t understand you doesn’t mean what you have to say isn’t important. If they don’t see you, it doesn’t mean that you are unseen.”

marion eames white

marion eames white is taking several summer language courses, including cuneiform, as an MFA candidate in the Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine.

white’s current work focuses on translation and translation theory. “I am tracking the evolution of certain deities and godlike figures from the old Babylonian era up to Judeo-Christian history and literature,” they say. “I want to identify parallels between the genealogy of biblical figures and the self-actualization of trans identity and contemporary queer communities,” which they jokingly add may sound a bit out there. They want to subvert or flip Western hegemonic traditions that bring down the trans and queer community and lift them up instead. 

white did not study poetry while earning a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, but they had always kept writing while doing other work, thanks to their parents’ encouragement. “It’s how I’ve been able to express my feelings most accurately,” white says. “I appreciate how it [poetry] is different for everyone but has the capacity to function as something that is pretty galvanizing or revolutionary.”