Fellowship | Undocupoets

Undocupoets Fellowship Application

The annual Undocupoets Fellowship grants three unrestricted $500 fellowships to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States.

Fellows also receive a scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center to attend the 2025 Summer Workshop Program in Provincetown, MA. The dates of their classes run from June 15 to August 16, 2025. The scholarship covers the cost of tuition and housing for a one-week residency, as well as a $500 stipend to help cover transportation and food costs. Selected Fellows are not required to attend and this will not impact final decisions.

Honoring our foundational, five-year partnership with Sibling Rivalry Press, Undocupoets remains committed to reserving at least one of the fellowships to LGBTQ poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States.

Deadline: February 14, 2025, at 11:59 pm ET

Apply Here

2023 Undocupoets Fellowship Recipients

We are delighted to welcome the new 2023 Undocupoets Fellowship recipients Charlotte Abotsi, Mico Astrid, and Georgio Russell. Nearing our 10th year as an organization we are humbled and awestruck at the talent, vision, and range of aesthetics we have encountered year after year of offering the Undocupoets Fellowship. With each new cohort, we meet and are honored to introduce poets who challenge us to envision the possibilities of our art. This year we received more applications for the fellowship than any previous year, which means that our voices are growing as well as the need for them to be heard.

Charlotte Abotsi

Charlotte Abotsi is a poet raised in Providence, Rhode Island. As a spoken word poet, she has competed in several international poetry slams. Her work has been written about in HuffPost and Mic.com, and her poems can be read in Wax Nine journal. She has received fellowships from the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Tin House, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, AIR Serenbe, and Define American. She co-curated season two of the poetry-based web series Ours Poetica for the Poetry Foundation.

Georgio Russell

Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and an alumnus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as well as the Obsidian Foundation. He is a past winner of the Peepal Tree Press Prize (2019), the Mervyn Morris Prize (2020), the Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), and the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024). He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2022 and 2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and long-listed for the National Poetry Competition (2022) held by the Poetry Society. Russell was also a featured poet for the British Council’s project, Unwritten Poems: Exploring Caribbean Engagement in WWI. His work has been published in Yolk Literary Magazine, PREE magazine, Frontier Poetry, the London Magazine, Lolwe, Cordite, Magma, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Brampton, Ontario, where he teaches English for Educate Academy. Some of his favorite poets include Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Ocean Vuong, Kwame Dawes, and Roger Reeves.

Mico Astrid

Mico Astrid is a Filipino/American multidisciplinary artist whose work explores diasporic identity, lived experience, and memory. As an immigrant who lived undocumented in the U.S. for twenty years, their practice centers the illumination of stark realities under oppressive states and ultimately works toward a greater collective understanding of injustices embedded in current systems. Mico was born in the Philippines, raised throughout California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington: unceded Duwamish land. Their work can be found in the Quarterless Review, Opal Literary Magazine, and at micoastrid.com.

Work by Undocupoets Fellows