Today, Chicago-based arts organization United States Artists announced their 2025 USA Fellows, a group of 50 artists, including seven Writing Fellows, each of whom will receive a cash award of $50,000. Recipients are encouraged to use this unrestricted grant “for any purpose, whether that be creating new work, paying rent, reducing debt, obtaining healthcare, or supporting their families.”
Here are the 2025 USA Writing Fellows, along with brief bios:
New York-based Matthew Salesses is an author exploring the craft and pedagogy of fiction writing and Asian American identity. Salesses’s forthcoming memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown), situates personal and private grief within the larger Asian American adoptee experience.
Arizona-based Raquel Gutiérrez is a writer and educator, currently working on a novel that considers networks of radical affinities in Los Angeles in the 1980s, as well as a corresponding series of public programs at UCLA’s Center for Art and Performance this Spring.
Mississippi-based Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a nature writer, poet, educator, and author of the New York Times best-selling collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments.
Arizona-based Bojan Louis is a poet and writer invested in relationships between academia, working-class artists, and the Indigenous nations of Arizona, and most recently, the author of the short story collection Sinking Bell (Graywolf Press, 2022).
California-based Deesha Philyaw is a writer who explores satire and experimentation with form, with a short story in the anthology, That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor, to be published in the summer of 2025 by Pantheon Books.
Oregon-based Joan Naviyuk Kane is a King Islander writer, who is co-editing a forthcoming anthology Colonialism & the Environment: Pasts, Presents, and Futures (2025).
New York-based Angie Cruz is a novelist and Editor of Aster(ix) Journal, a transnational feminist literary and arts journal that centers works by people of color. Cruz is working on a forthcoming children’s novel.
