Fellows

Vero González is a queer femme-inist writer and translator from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has a MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she was a Dean's Graduate Fellow and a BFA from Pratt Institute, where she won the Thesis Prize in Fiction. She has received support from A Room of Her Own Foundation (Touching Lives Fellow, 2015) as well as Hedgebrook and the Rona Jaffe Foundation (Hedgebrook/Rona Jaffe Inaugural Fellow, 2018). She lives in Boston, where she is working on a hybrid book about intergenerational trauma, colonialism, and healing. Vero is GrubStreet's Neighborhood Programs Fellow for Egleston Square.

Quentin Lucas is a Germany-born, Boston-raised bookworm. After meandering through college on his way to a degree in Business Management, he then adventured his way through the US Army and discovered a need to follow his passion for writing. As a freelancer, copywriter, and essayist, Quentin has worked on projects with MIT and Vistaprint, and has written for publications like the Huffington Post, The Good Men Project, Blerds Online, and Fourth River Literary Magazine. While awaiting the fall of 2019, when he will begin his MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College, Quentin is crafting the second novel of his fantasy trilogy and is considering a memoir about his military days.

I’ve provided consultation services on everything from poetry chapbooks to book-length academic projects to historical novels published by New York Times-bestselling authors. I'm particularly interested in helping clients who wish, with their writing, to shed light in these dark times. To that end, I'm drawn to stories from and about under-represented groups. I love working with clients operating within different genres, as I believe stories can be compelling whether they take place down the street today, 50 years ago, or on another planet. Come talk to me about your literary novel, your slipstream flash fiction, your comedic memoir, or your historical novella! I also offer cultural consulting & sensitivity reading; as a queer black woman who immigrated from Jamaica when I was young, I grew up noticing certain things about American culture(s) that my education and reading have helped me to name, enabling me to guide other writers who want to respect our complex human community.

Maria Pinto is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Frigg, Necessary Fiction, The Toast, Word Riot and elsewhere. She studied Creative Writing and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University, where she was awarded the Dafna Gesundheit Prize for Fiction. She was an Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston shortly after graduation, and in the summer of 2017 was selected to spend a month with four other writers in the Berkshires as a resident at The Mastheads, working in a studio on Herman Melville’s estate. When she’s not reading, writing her second novel, teaching creative writing, or freelance editing, she can be found in the woods exercising her left brain functions by studying fungi as an amateur mycologist. 

Nakia Hill is a writer, educator, and journalist. She was the co-writer and lead interviewer for Double Elvis' Here Comes the Break, a hip-hop inspired audio drama podcast. Nakia is a founding board member of Boston Art Review. In 2018, Nakia was named a Boston Artist-in-Residence by Mayor Marty Walsh. During her residency, she published two books: Water Carrier and I Still Did It. Nakia also explored how art influences government policy and launched the Boston Women in the Workplace survey where she gathered narratives from women about navigating the work sector in Boston. Nakia's work focuses on archiving Black women's and girls' stories through print publications and empowering them to use writing as a tool for healing, advocacy, and resistance.

Hi, my name is Claudia Wilson. I'm a poet and writer: ( They & She). Here's my formal bio: I'm from Cleveland & Columbus, Ohio. I studied English and Black Studies in college. I'm a social worker and I received my MFA from UMass Amherst. I'm proud of the venue/spaces where I really grew as a poet namely Columbus, and Boston ( Writer's Block, Cantab, and House Slam). These spaces have greatly contributed to my creativity and community. I'm a VONA fellow and TWH ( The Writer's Hotel) graduate, and soon to be apart of the Juniper Institute. My chapbook is called GROWN 2019 from Game Over Books Press. My forthcoming book is called Searching for Afrekete. I've been published in Winter Tangerine and Mass Poetry. I'm a recent Mass Cultural Council Recipient, Academy of American Poets finalist , and Sara Patton awardee. Due to my previous work I think about trauma-informed practices and I am happy to offer sessions on this, too. I am interested in the conversations and spaces that poetry offers me. My ambition for myself is for poetry to live as theory and praxis. June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison are the writers I return to. I find that my poetics center around conversations of past black or QTPOC writers to deepen my relation to the present and how I observe the world. I'm not a fan of the essentialism of genre. I think we're all writing towards something and that genre conventions can be useful, but should not always be required. I am queer, black and Trans. I am also still learning.