Introducing the 2024-2025 Teaching Fellows: Toni Bee and Fabienne François Keck. The Teaching Fellowship for Black Writers provides financial and professional development support to two self-identified Black writers interested in teaching classes, participating in events, and working with our instructors and staff to deepen our curriculum. The fellowship includes compensation of $25,000, artistic mentorship, and access to the GrubStreet community and the Muse and the Marketplace conference. We couldn't be more excited to congratulate and welcome Toni and Fabienne!
Toni Bee is a poet, educator, and photographer hailing from Boston, MA. She made history as the first woman to hold the esteemed position of Poet Populist of Cambridge and was also the Inaugural Cambridge Poetry Ambassador. Toni's journey as a poet began in high school and after gaining her bachelor's at Simmons University, she self-published her first poetry book, "22 Again."
Toni's impact extends beyond her own work as she is a community builder. She is founder and curator of Poets In The Garden in residence at The Longfellow House and Washington Headquarters in Cambridge. The program amplifies the voices of BIPOC and all poetic and artistic individuals, welcoming them into public green spaces. Bee says “open communication” is her niche and she has served on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and at Cambridge Community Television – where she once was a neighborhood journalist and hosted a tv show.
Song, rhyme, and free verse decorate Toni’s writing and performance. This Dorchester/Roxbury raised poet has featured at various venues: The Grolier Poetry BookShop, Boch Center & Shubert Theatres, The Woodberry Poetry Room, The Lizard Lounge, The Cantab (Boston Poetry Slam), the Menino Art Center, Stone Soup Poetry, and the Cambridge and Public Library.
The poet has also been published in Boog City and has been a panelist at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. As a storyteller and teaching artist, Bee has worked on writing with teens and youth in Boston and Cambridge schools and programs. She has held writing workshops with Writers Without Margins, Revolutionary Spaces, and IWWG: The International Women’s Writing Guild. This creative has been granted the Woman of Distinction award by YWCA Cambridge for her achievements and ‘given her flowers’ from Mass Poetry. Learn more about Bee and her journey at tonibee.org. In her spare time, you might find Toni’s at an art museum, community event, or a writing retreat like The Renaissance House in Martha’s Vineyard, expanding her lens and gathering ideas.
Fabienne François Keck (she/her) is a Haitian-American writer based in the Boston area. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is an alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her work is forthcoming in The Southampton Review.
A world traveler and fluent speaker of three languages, Fabienne appreciates working within the constraints and the possibilities of the short story form. Her fiction meditates on cross-generational ties and inherited trauma, themes of family versus chosen family, and human connection versus disconnection.