Simpson Fellows — New Literary Project

Bonetti-Bell Workshops & Fellowship

The Bonnie Bonetti-Bell Fellows are extraordinary creative writing teachers who are graduate students in the University of California, Berkeley, English Department. They are selected in consultation with New Literary Project and assigned to conduct workshops for traditionally overlooked fledgling teenage and younger authors in a variety of school and afterschool settings. The workshops are subsidized by New Literary Project in partnership with Berkeley and offered free of charge. From 2017-2023, these workshops and fellowships were named the Simpson Fellowship and Simpson Workshops. We are grateful for those years of support. Moving forward in 2024, they have been renamed as the Bonetti-Bell Workshops and Fellowship after Bonnie Bonetti-Bell.

One of these settings is Girls Inc. of Alameda County, where 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize winner Danielle Evans recently spoke.

Workshop students and Bonetti-Bell Fellows are often published in the annual, internationally distributed anthology of Project-related authors: Simpsonistas. These writers appear alongside distinguished award-winning authors affiliated with the Project.

NewLit is pleased to recognize this year’s fellows who will be conducting the following workshops:

Girls Inc:

* Uttara Chaudhuri

* Ariel Baker-Gibbs

Mt McKinley High School:

* Andy King

Northgate High School:

* Eric Muscosky

Albany High School:

* Camille Santana Considine

Spring 2024

Bonetti-Bell Fellows

Ariel Baker-Gibbs (Girls Inc. Alameda County)

Ariel Baker-Gibbs is a PhD student in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley, where they work on science fiction, fantasy, and the young adult novel and queer and crip studies. They also work as a substitute teacher at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont. They're also originally from Canada so they love swimming in very cold water, picking berries, and making jam.

Uttara Chaudhuri (Girls Inc. Alameda County)

Originally from New Delhi, India, Uttara Chintamani Chaudhuri is a second-year graduate student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. When she is not reading, writing or teaching, she likes to daydream, take long walks, exchange bad puns, listen to music, cook and, occasionally, sing.

Andrew David King (Mt. McKinley High School; Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall)

Andrew David King (they/he) is a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley, where they study the intersection of disability, class, and literature, especially as manifested in American poetic traditions. Originally from the East Bay, they attended Berkeley as an undergraduate, earning a BA in Philosophy and English; they've since earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in Philosophy from Central European University, and have served as Provost’s Visiting Writer and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s Department of English and Research Assistant at the Walt Whitman Archive. They’re the author of the artist’s chapbook Fire Sonnets (published through Clepsydra Press, their indie micropress imprint) and the co-founder of Diptych: A Book Artists' and Writers' Reading Series. Their critical and creative work appears in ZYZZYVA, Best New Poets 2018 and 2020, The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, Designing for Care, and more. With San Francisco writer Mary Ladd, they edited The Long COVID Reader (2023), the first anthology of writing by those who identify as living with long COVID.

Camille Santana Considine (Albany High School)

Camille Santana Considine is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where they study contemporary poetry and poetics in English and Spanish. When not writing, they love to watch New Wave films, long hikes, looking for hot springs, and fermentation projects.

Eric William Muscosky (Northgate High School)

Eric Muscosky is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies the transition from the realist to the modernist novel. He loves the Sierra Nevadas, the Russian River, painting in oils, teaching writing, and tackling the occasional carpentry project.