October 23, 2024
New York, NY—For over 30 years, Lambda Literary has championed LGBTQIA+ books and authors based on its belief that lives are affirmed and culture preserved when our stories are written, published, and read. Since 2007, Lambda Literary has offered the Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices—the nation’s premier LGBTQIA+ writing residency, which brings together emerging poets, playwrights, screenwriters, essayists, novelists, memoirists, and writers across genre in a safe, welcoming, and love-centered community.
In 2025, as we did in 2024, we are holding our Writers Retreat online. This format allows for us as an organization to continue building our resources while offering the same high-quality programming that remains accessible to folks who may not otherwise be able to attend in-person programs.
We are excited to announce that this year, we will be lengthening the typically week-long program to a 10-day virtual retreat, from Thursday, July 31-Saturday, August 9. In this new model, we will use the first two evenings on Thursday and Friday to build community and hold additional programming. We hope that this new model will build relationships and community, offer more learning opportunities, but we also aim to allow those attending the retreat from home to continue to sustain the elements of their livelihood outside of the Retreat program.
Additionally, we will be adding a brand new cohort to our Writers Retreat: the screen/play/writing cohort. This cross-genre cohort is meant for performance writers who work outside of the stage/screen binary, those who waft between genres, and those who are working in adaptations. We invite all screenwriters and playwrights in this cohort to consider how their work can move between genres, between stage and screen, while centering writing for performance. Coming back for another year after an astounding stint as Playwriting Faculty in 2024, we welcome back Roger Q. Mason to lead this inaugural cohort!
Applications for fellowships open on November 1, 2024 and close at 11:59 PM EST on December 8th, 2024.
Without further ado, Lambda Literary is pleased to announce the 2025 Faculty to lead our fellows during our prestigious Writers Retreat.
Fiction
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Fiction is Fatimah Asghar.
Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer, Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer who cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. They are the author of If They Come For Us (One World, 2018), a collection of poems on orphaning, family, Partition, borders, shifting identity, and violence; the lyrical novel, When We Were Sisters (One World, 2022), an exploration of sisterhood, orphaning, and alternate family building which was longlisted for the National Book Award, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; as well as the chapbook After (Yes Yes Books, 2015).
Nonfiction
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Nonfiction is Aisha Sabatini Sloan.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan was born and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA in English from Carleton College, an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona.
She is the author of The Fluency of Light, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. She is the winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award, the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, the Jean Córdova prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Nonfiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her essays can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Autostraddle, Guernica, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, among other places. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Playwriting
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Playwriting is Hansol Jung.
Hansol Jung is a playwright from South Korea. Productions include Merry Me (NYTW), Wolf Play (Soho Rep and Ma-Yi, NNPN Rolling Premiere: Artists Rep, Company One) Wild Goose Dreams (The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse), Play On! Translation of Romeo and Juliet (NAATCO) Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival at ATL), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi Theatre), and No More Sad Things (Sideshow, Boise Contemporary). Commissions from MTC & Arena Stage, The Kennedy Center, The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theatre, National Theatre in UK, Playwrights Horizons, Artists Repertory Theater, Ma-Yi Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work has been developed at Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Hedgebrook, Berkeley Repertory, Sundance Theatre Lab, O’Neill Theater Center, and the Lark. Hansol is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel Award Best Play, Obie Award, Steinberg Award, Hodder Fellowship, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, MacDowell Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court.
Poetry
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Poetry is Kay Ulanday Barrett.
A 2024 Disabled Futures Fellow awarded by The Ford Foundation and United States Artists, Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry by Foundation for Contemporary Arts. They have been awarded residencies from Tin House, James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell, Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship, and Millay Arts. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have been featured at The United Nations, The MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), The Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, The School of the Art Institute, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, The Ford Foundation, and more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, The Literary Hub, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Unbound, The Advocate, The Rumpus, NYLON, them., Al Jazeera, & more.
Screenwriting
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Screenwriting is Steven Canals.
STEVEN CANALS is the Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning co-creator, executive producer, director and writer of the FX drama series, POSE. A groundbreaking Queer, Afro-Puerto Rican creator, Steven’s work on POSE has received numerous accolades, including: two AFI Awards for TV Program of the Year, three GLAAD Media Awards for Outstanding Drama Series, plus Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award nominations for Best Drama Series. Steven has received the Final Draft Awards’ ‘New Voice Award for TV’ in addition to being featured on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter’s Pride
Issue, and named to their list of the ’50 Most Powerful LGBTQ Players in Hollywood.’ The Hollywood Reporter has also named Steven one of Hollywood’s ‘50 Most Powerful TV Showrunners.’ Steven is currently directing episodically while developing new projects that center the voices and stories of historically marginalized/underrepresented communities under his Story Ave. Productions banner.
Screen/Play/Writing
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of play/screenwriting is Roger Q. Mason.
Roger Q. Mason (they/them) is an award-winning writer, performer and educator who uses the lens of history to disrupt the biases that divide rather than unite us. Their playwriting has been seen on Broadway (Circle in the Square Reading Series); Off and Off-Off-Broadway; and regionally. Mason’s World Premiere of Lavender Men was lauded by the Los Angeles Times as “evoking the mingled visions of Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeremy O. Harris and Michael R. Jackson.” Mason is currently celebrating two world premieres: The Duat with Philadelphia Theatre Company and The Pride of Lions with Theatre Rhinoceros, as well as the regional premiere of Lavender Men with Chicago’s About Face Theatre. Mason holds degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. They are a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and an alum of Ma-Yi’s Writing Lab, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group and Primary Stages Writing Cohort. Instagram: @rogerq.mason
Speculative Fiction
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Speculative Fiction is Nisi Shawl.
Nisi Shawl is an African American writer and editor best known for their widely acclaimed instructional text Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, the multiple award-winning New Suns anthologies, and the Nebula finalist novel Everfair. In 2019 they received the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished service to the genre of science fiction. They edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia Butler Scholars, and co-edited Stories for Chip and Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Shawl lives in Seattle, where they take frequent walks with their cat.
Young Adult Fiction
The Faculty Member to lead our fellows in their study of Young Adult Fiction is Aiden Thomas.
Aiden Thomas is a Latino American author of young adult novels, best known for their book, Cemetery Boys which was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards, including best of the year recognition from the American Library Association, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, NPR and School Library Journal. Originally from Oakland, California, they now make their home in Portland, OR. Aiden is notorious for not being able to guess the endings of books and movies, and organizes their bookshelves by color.
We are honored to welcome all eight of our faculty members to our 2025 Retreat. To learn more, please visit the Retreat page.
With care,
chloe feffer (they/she/he)
Program Manager
Lambda Literary
