Today, Chicago-based arts organization United States Artists announced their 2026 USA Fellows, a group of 50 artists, including five 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 2026 USA Writing Fellows, along with brief bios:
Johanna Hedva | Los Angeles, CA
Multigenre Writer, Artist, and Musician
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs | New York, NY
Interdisciplinary Poet and Relative
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a writer, vocalist, and sound artist from Harlem. Diggs uses words, beads, sinew, electronics, video, and her voice to examine memory, erasure, identity, and language within the urban landscape. She is the author of several chapbooks, mini pamphlets, one album, and two full-length poetry collections.
Lauren Rebecca Weinstein | Maplewood, NJ
Sequential Artist
Lauren Weinstein is a cartoonist and artist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Nautilus, and The Guardian, among many other outlets. For the past twenty years, Weinstein’s funny, beautiful, and bizarre comics and graphic novels have addressed universal human issues such as mortality, time, motherhood, and most recently, domestic violence. Since 2019, she has been the artist-in-residence at Town Clock CDC, teaching art to the survivors that live there.
Mayukh Sen | Brooklyn, NY
Nonfiction Writer
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (2021) and Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025). Sen’s work focuses on immigration.
Sarah Aziza | Brooklyn, NY
Creative Writer, Poet, and Performer
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Aziza has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, and the West Bank, in addition to the United States.
