Artistic power unleashed

2023 Jack Hazard Fellows Announced

Congratulations to our Jack Hazards ’23! These NewLit Fellows are fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir writers who teach full-time in an accredited high school in the United States, and they represent our full-throated commitment to support writers across the generations, communities, and divides. We provide a $5,000 award enabling these creative writers who teach to focus freely on their writing for a summer.

We received a tremendous number of worthy applicants who teach at public, private, charter, and independent schools throughout the nation—Hawaii to Florida, Los Angeles to Boston, Chicago to New York City. Last year, we honored and funded nine Jack Hazards ’22. This year, NewLit honors and funds as Jack Hazards ’23 these fourteen exceptionally wonderful writers who teach:

William Archila
STEAM Virtual Academy (Los Angeles, CA)
No One's Watching: A Memoir out of El Salvador

Victoria María Castells
Miami Arts Charter School (Miami, FL)
Tired as We Are: A Novel

Leticia Del Toro
Campolindo High School (Moraga, CA)
Return to Azucena: A Novel

Elizabeth DiNuzzo
The Albany Academies (Albany, NY)
The Foreverness: A Memoir

t’ai freedom ford
Benjamin Banneker Academy (Brooklyn, NY)
The Surge: A Novel

Emily Y. Harnett
The Haverford School (Haverford, PA)
The Other Side of Forgetting: Essays

Jeff Kass
Pioneer High School (Ann Arbor, MI)
Forgotten Man: A Novel

Ariana Kelly
Boston University Academy (Boston, MA)
Lay Me Down Like a Stone: A Memoir

Kate McQuade
Phillips Academy (Andover, MA)
Hollow Arts: A Novel

Tyson Morgan
Crystal Springs Uplands School (Hillsborough, CA)
The Immaculate: A Novel

Shareen K. Murayama
Henry J. Kaiser High School (Honolulu, HI)
How to Kill a Factory Girl & Baabaa and Jiji Series: Novellas

Sahar Mustafah
Homewood-Flossmoor High School (Chicago, IL)
The Tree of Life & Other Stories

Ky-Phong Tran
Long Beach Renaissance High School for the Arts (Long Beach, CA)
A Thing Called Exodus: Short Stories

Vernon Clifford Wilson
Horace Mann School (Bronx, NY)
True History of the Inner City: A Novel

NewLit Round-up

Kevin Allardice, Jack Hazards ‘22, spent last summer writing his fourth
novel, which is now about to be published this summer.

The novel follows Bridget, a con artist, and her teen son as they travel to malls across America, posing as casting directors for the newly announced Star Wars prequels. On Halloween weekend of 1997, their pursuit of a mark leads them into a haunted house deep in a gated suburban community. To find her son and get him safely out, Bridget must negotiate the fraught spaces of the haunted house. Increasingly unsure where artifice ends and the phantasmic begins, she falls deeper into her own past and the horrific secrets of her host.

PREORDER WEFT TODAY

Molly Montgomery, also a Jack Hazard ‘22, leads her classroom at Emery High School, which will become the first site for our new Iris Starn Workshops, where MFA candidates from St. Mary’s College of California teach creative
writing workshops (much like our program with U.C. Berkeley—the Simpson Workshops). The Starn Workshops will also be home to a new collaboration with Arion Press, who will be leading a letterpress and bookmaking tutorial
to further unleash artistic power.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS YEAR’S IRIS STARN WORKSHOPS

Mehak Faisal Khan, Simpson Fellow at Northgate HS, has just accepted a position as Assistant Professor next year at the University of Notre Dame.

Andrew David King—also a Simpson fellow—is revving up for their workshops at Mt. McKinley High School (Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall). They are simultaneously celebrating a new development: becoming sub-editor of the
book reviews section of the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, an open-source, interdisciplinary humanities journal based out of
the University of Leeds in the UK.

Ian Maloney, Jack Hazard Fellowship Director, was recently featured on Lit Hub. In his article of note, Ian reflects on Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, celebrating 30 years since the book’s publication. His review makes a compelling case for rereading: “In reading it this time, I saw it a hero’s journey.”

North Figueroa Books

North Figueroa Bookshop is a general interest bookstore in the heart of the historic Highland Park neighborhood of Northeast Los Angeles, a joint venture of Rare Bird and Unnamed Press, two Los Angeles–based independent book publishers, with the collaborative support of founding publisher sponsors, Grove Atlantic and MCD Books.

This bookshop was founded in partnership by our very own publicist and a founding supporter of NewLit, Tyson Cornell, who is also the publisher of Rare Bird Books. The store stocks NewLit publications, like Simpsonistas, Vol. 4, published by Rare Bird, our most recent anthology.

The store directly serves the neighborhoods of Highland Park, Glassell Park, and Eagle Rock, and is a beautiful, custom-design literary space that seeks to connect the independent publishing community with readers, booksellers, authors, and book lovers. The store's shelves hold a rotating selection of titles from our publishing partners, as well as a curated general interest selection with a focus on California history and literature, literature in translation, books in Spanish, and independent press publications.

Support creative writers & teachers today

The year is in full swing, and so is NewLit. With your support, we can continue providing opportunities to writers in all stages of their careers. Join us today in our mission to drive social change, and unleash artistic power.

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