The Literary Arts Residency
Shuffle Collective’s Literary Arts Residency is a six month program that brings together writers from all literary backgrounds to build community, develop professionally and hone their craft.
The 2020 Residency applications are closed, but there are lots of ways to get involved with the Literary Arts Collective. Learn more!
The goal of this residency is to let writers carve out time and space for their craft while providing them with tools, resources and skills to develop professionally. In collaboration with each other, residents help build and cultivate peer support & community while gaining hands-on experience in the areas of education, performance, event production and community engagement. Residents meet regularly to critique each other's work, share skills and partake in workshops with guest facilitators. They also get opportunities to participate in Shuffle’s monthly pop-up literary events as well as in the final group showcase of their projects.
About the Residency
Meet our residents
Our 2020 cohort represents an interdisciplinary mix of authors across fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. They have been selected for their literary prowess, vision, and dedication to community building.
Allie is a Bay Area poet and educator with roots in the chaparral of southern California. Her writing is published in the 2019 anthology The Kerf Seeks, Manzano Mountain Review, Cholla Needles, Living on Earth Radio, and Open Ceilings. Her poems flicker between encounters with the wild, the tamed, and the awkward. She teaches environmental science and is an active member of Pen America.
Angelica is a queer woman of color who is proudly the daughter of an immigrant. She studied Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State. She creates in the fields of playwriting and poetry, and the themes of her work surround her identity, American culture, and what it means to survive in a world not created for you.
Audrey writes fiction with a dark edge about what goes awry when human connection is missing from our lives. Her most recent book, "Tiny Shoes Dancing and Other Stories," was shortlisted for the 2019 Rubery Book Award. She is the author of "What Remains Unsaid" and "Dance of Souls." and more than a dozen online and print journals have published her work. She is the president of the SF Peninsula Branch of the California Writers Club.
Ayesha Mattu’s two anthologies – "Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of Muslim Women" and "Salaam, Love: Muslim Men on Love, Sex, & Intimacy" – have been featured globally from the New York Times to the BBC to the Jakarta Post. Her work has most recently been anthologized in: "Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion"; and the upcoming "Once Upon an Eid: Stories of Hope & Joy by 15 Muslim Voices."
Ayesha Mattu
Dorian is a visual artist, writer, curator & zine maker, involved in queer art and literary communities in the Bay Area for 20 years. Dorian draws as her character or alter ego, Poppers the Pony. She has an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford & has exhibited nationally. Her writing & art have also been published in ALMANAC, Salome, OpenSpace (SFMOMA), and many more.
Duana is a literary medical anthropologist and ethnographer of science who writes non-fiction anthropological works. She also writes poetry to chronicle seemingly contradictory elements of modern life. Her work is interdisciplinary, multi-lingual (English, French, Wolof) and spans and connects metropolises that aren’t often linked (Oakland, Paris, Dakar). She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford.
Elizabeth’s works have been featured in the Museum of Walking, CityLit, San Diego Writers Ink and has recently been longlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize 2019. Her current novel, Family Business, is about a Californian family dealing with the aftermath of the recession. She is a graduate of the Novel Studio program at City, University of London and holds a Certificate in Literary Publishing from Emerson College.
Jacob was born in Placerville, CA. but San Francisco gave his pen rhythm and polished the scuffs off his lens. Nicaraguan Revolutionary Poets & free-form scribes interest him most. Jacob can often be found writing in The Mission district. He's working on a book of travel stories.
Iris is a poet and social justice advocate. Hailing from New York City, she is a first-generation Guyanese- American. In 2018, Iris was selected as a semi-finalist Fulbright Scholar for an English Teaching Assistantship in South Africa. Currently, Iris is a journalist in training with the Maynard Institute of Journalism Education as well as working on a solo poetry piece to debut at the 2020 Afro Solo Arts Festival.
Jen is an educator, life coach, social justice co-conspirator, and lifelong learner. She is the founder of The Unwound Mind where she uses art, storytelling, and identity explorations to make visible unconscious beliefs and mindsets that create barriers to showing up as our genuine, authentic selves. She finds inspiration for writing through her personal experiences, archival documents, and oral histories.
Karla is a Bay Area poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange, facilitating cross-cultural exchange between Oakland and West African poets. She is editing a pan-Africanist poetry collection to be published by Pacific Raven Press. She holds an MFA from Mills and her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized widely.
Lyzette is an SF writer, editor, and creative writing workshop instructor. Her work reflects the peri-racial, social, and economic experiences of African-Americans. Her essays have appeared in Callaloo, Tampa Review, The MacGuffin, amongst others. She has been awarded writing residencies and artist grants from many cultural and arts organizations, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Mills College.
Miah is the author of The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic 2017), The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2020). Miah is also the founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Reggie is a poet, educator, and community organizer based out of Richmond, CA. They are the co-founder of Alchemy Slam and the Oakland Poetry Slam. They are the 2019 Berkeley Grand Slam Champion, the Poetry Battles Game 6 Champion, the Foglifter Emerging Writer Youth Fellow, and a Onye Ozi Fellow. Their poetry can be found in Rigorous Magazine and two self-published chapbooks I'm Too Black for This Shxt and Sadboi.
Reggie Edmonds
Sage is the founder of Vulvas + Voltas, a literary collective and a 2017 Litquake Emerging Writer. She released her first chapbook, Trashcan Funeral, with dancing girl press. Her work has been published in Cotton Xenomorph, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Glass Poetry, and more. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco.
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