Moira J. Is Our 2019 Frontier New Voices Fellow!
We are so pleased to share with you all that poet Moira J. has been chosen as our New Voices Fellow for 2019.
Our New Voices Fellowship is designed to uplift and support emerging poets from traditionally marginalized communities. Last year, Susan Yanos, as a poet over 50 years old, held the title. Moira J. was selected this year from a wonderful group of submissions by poets of indigenous backgrounds.
At 26, Moira J. has accomplished much as an emerging author, with a long list of stellar publications (including Frontier)—here is why, in their own words:
“I poet because at nine years old I was a child who lived in constant terror and needed reconnection to wonderment. My mother recognized this and taught me to write poetry, saying it was a way for me to describe the world as if no one was able to see it, so I could create a world for myself and others to find validation. She gifted me the choice to find joy, and passed on our cultural connections as storytellers. Poetry has allowed me to celebrate being someone nonbinary and N’dee (Apache), even as I exist in a world that looks to erase and kill me and my kinships. I poet because it is my way of connecting to my heart and to my ancestors, it is where I experience ceremony and gratitude for my survival.”
Moira will receive a $500 grant to go towards submission fees, editorial guidance on their work, the opportunity to read for Frontier and join our community, and also publication of their poetry or prose.
Thank you to everyone who applied, and please keep a lookout for our next 2020 New Voices Fellowship submission opportunity, for undocumented poets.
MOIRA J. is an agender, Dzil Łigai Si’an N’dee (White Mountain Apache) poet who lives in Boston. They are the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. Moira J.’s writing examines narratives of indigeneity, queerness, gender, sex, kinship, and illness. Their debut poetry collection “Bury Me in Thunder” is forthcoming with Sundress Publications in 2019.
Read Moira’s “These Are the Witness Marks,” published by Frontier in September, 2017.
Read more of their recent work here.
Their first full-length collection will release in late 2019 from Sundress Publications.
