Writers Studio San Francisco Student Maurya Kerr Named 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow

We are delighted to share that Maurya Kerr, a Writers Studio San Francisco student, has been named a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellow. Congratulations, Maurya!

The NEA awards creative writing fellowships of $25,000 in alternating years in prose (fiction and creative nonfiction) and poetry. These grants allow recipients the time and space to create, revise, conduct research, and connect with readers. The program is described as “arguably the most egalitarian grant program in its field: applications are free and open to the public; fellows are selected through an anonymous review process in which the sole criterion is artistic excellence; and the judging panel is diverse and varies year to year.”

Maurya Kerr is a Bay Area-based writer and artist. Her poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appears in multiple journals, including Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, Magma Poetry, and an anthology, The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. She is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy noun (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award).