Kelly Writers House Post-Bacc Fellow, 2019-20: Maya Arthur

We here at 3805 Locust Walk are thrilled to announce that MAYA ARTHUR (C’18) has been selected as the inaugural Kelly Writers House Post-Baccalaureate Fellow.

The KWH Post-Bacc Fellows project extends a central objective of the Writers House: to direct resources toward opportunities, learning experiences, and foundational support to young writers. The position comes with a full year of support (a full-time salary, mentorship, and career-boosting learning opportunities). During the course of her fellowship, Maya will pursue a self-directed creative project, working closely with Professor Simone White, who has been named her faculty mentor. She will also work several hours a week at the Writers House, where she will learn editing and curating with PennSound and Jacket2, and will assist with the presentation of public events.

Here’s more about Maya:

Maya Arthur is a writer and novice archivist/artist/researcher. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. During her time at Penn, she gardened in graves, founded a zine library, recorded podcasts, and ate as much Fu Wah banh mi as she could. Her senior year thesis was titled “Comma, Virginia,” a collection of poetry that sought to find cohesion through the collision and estrangement of genre, perspective, and mobility. In her thesis, she focused on the intricacies and history of her father’s family and the small, rural town they are from and where they still reside. She is currently based in New York but is so excited to return to Philadelphia and to the Kelly Writers House community. Through the KWH Post-Bacc Fellowship, she hopes to expand her thesis into a multimedia project that explores creating one’s own archive. She is also a 2019 Lambda Poetry Fellow.

More information about the KWH Post-Bacc Fellows Program is available here:

http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/postbaccfellow/

We’re excited to see what Maya will do! Please join us in congratulating her.