Introducing the 2025-2026 Teaching Fellows: Magenta and Cherline Bazile. 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 Manuscript Mart. We couldn't be more excited to congratulate and welcome Magenta and Cherline!
Magenta (Alisha Acquaye, she/they) is a Black queer writer, teaching artist and multidimensional artist from Brooklyn, NY. Their art is curious about shapeshifting, Black diasporic myths, love, horror, afrosurrealism and the elasticity of Black femme and nonbinary embodiment. Magenta is published (under their government, Alisha Acquaye) in Carve Magazine, The Iowa Review, Plentitudes Journal, Allure, Teen Vogue, and more places. As a teaching artist, Magenta curates imaginative writing spaces for Black, queer and POC writers to explore different realms within themselves. Magenta is a 2023 recipient of NYSCA’s Support for Artists Grant and has participated in The Bandung Residency, The Free Black Women's Library: Obsidian, StoryKnife Writers Retreat, Tin House and Rhode Island Writers Colony. Magenta loves to curate playlists, watch cartoons, bake pastries, dance in nature and talk to trees.
What does GrubStreet's Teaching Fellowship mean to you?
"Being a fellow offers me more grace, space and freedom to dive into my writing, art making, teaching and wellbeing, with greater expansiveness and wonder. I am often in conversation with myself about my responsibility as an artist, educator and life form occupying this earth with fellow humans and with nature. Facilitating writing spaces is an act of love. Sharing our words is an act of love. And amidst the grief and pain that we are experiencing nationally and globally, it has become even more imperative for us to create art in all forms. And not just to create for the sake of actualizing our imaginations and dreaming of better realities, but creativity as a tool of resistance, revolution and solidarity for those who are suffering, silenced and oppressed. I'm excited for what's in store in this new chapter. And I hope that fellowships and communities such as these, inspire more organizations to uplift people living at the margins, and to champion our art, voices and visions."
Cherline Bazile is a Haitian American writer from Florida. She graduated from Harvard University and received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. Her fiction has been featured in NPR’s Selected Shorts, The Sewanee Review, Symphony Space Theater, and the Best American Short Stories. Cherline has received fellowships from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Mass Cultural Council, among others. Her writing explores estrangement, power dynamics in intimate relationships, and the quest for joy. She lives in Boston.
What does GrubStreet's Teaching Fellowship mean to you?
"The GrubStreet Teaching Fellowship comes at the perfect time. The ability to experiment with course topics, hone my teaching practice, and meet more writers in Boston is an immense gift. I'm thrilled to see how I'll grow as an instructor and a writer."