Zara Chowdhary won the prized Parent-Writer Fellowship at the 2018 Writing Conference at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. The Parent-Writer Fellowships are intended to give parents the time and financial support to devote a week to themselves and their writing.
Zara shared, “I just got back from the 2018 Writing Conference at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and it was one of the best learning experiences I’ve had in a long while. I was fortunate to win one of their two prized Parent-Writer fellowships, but the travel and lodging would not have been possible without the grant I received through the ISU English Dept. The space, the diversity in voices, the sessions (especially a one-on-one editing session with speculative fiction author Sequoia Nagamatsu) were incredible. I went with an eye on fine-tuning a short story called ‘Threads’, which will now hopefully be part of a larger speculative collection. But I also ended up dabbling in poetry, widening my horizon and fell in love with the epistle thanks to brilliant mentors like Britton Shurley and Amelia Martens.
My gratitude to the English Director of Graduate Education and the English department for making this possible.”