The announces its literary fellows for this summer and the 2025-26 academic year. These fellowships provide support to writers as they research and revise book-length work for publication, while also building connections between fellows and the Las Vegas community through free, public programs.
Muriel Leung is BMI’s inaugural 117° Fellow and will be in residence in Las Vegas this summer. Named for Las Vegas’ hottest day on record in 2023, this residency provides a writer with a two-month fellowship in Las Vegas during June and July. The fellowship acknowledges that people live in (and not only visit) Las Vegas year-round and is intended to contribute to Las Vegas’ existing literary community with programming during the summer months.
KB Brookins and Isle McElroy have been selected as BMI’s Shearing Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. Supported through a gift by Miriam Shearing, the Shearing Fellowship is awarded to two writers who have published at least one book by a trade or literary press. These fellows contribute to the 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ and Las Vegas arts community through readings, workshops, and other public programming.
Saretta Morgan has been selected as the recipient of the new BMI-Kluge Fellowship. This three-month hybrid fellowship is supported by BMI and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. During the three-month term, the fellow will spend two weeks at the Library of Congress conducting research towards a proposed literary project. After the conclusion of their fellowship, the writer will visit BMI and 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ in Las Vegas to offer a public program during the academic year.
Maryam Ala Amjadi, BMI’s City of Asylum Fellow since 2023, will continue her fellowship for the academic year. BMI’s City of Asylum fellowship program offers refuge and community to writers escaping political persecution in their home countries. Over the years, BMI’s City of Asylum fellowship program has supported writers from Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, China, and Sierra Leone.
117° Fellow
Muriel Leung is the author of the novel How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company) and several poetry collections that include Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. Her work has been featured in PBS Newshour, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, among others. She is on the board of directors for Apogee Journal. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Fellow at the Ph.D. in creative writing and literature program at the University of Southern California. She is currently based in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the MFA in creative writing program at California Institute of the Arts.
2025-26 Shearing Fellows
KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. Bookins' chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award.
Their debut collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Bookins' memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024) won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Emerging Writer Award.
Isle McElroy is the author of The Atmospherians and People Collide, named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, NPR, Them, and The New York Times Critics. Their essays appear in The New York Times, The Cut, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In 2021, they founded Debuts & Redos, a socially-distanced, in-person reading series for writers who debuted during lockdown and could not hold in-person readings. They have a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, and they currently teach in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.
2025-26 BMI-Kluge Fellow
Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, Saretta Morgan's work engages the ecologies and forms of connectivity that manifest alongside processes of U.S. militarization. Morgan is the author of the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter Interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017), as well as the full-length collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), which received a 2024 Southwest Book Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.
City of Asylum Fellow
Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, and the translator of a selection of Raymond Carver’s poems into Persian. Her latest book, Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems) was published by Poetrywala in 2022.
Since coming to Las Vegas, she has been a part of the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl in Reno, and has been featured in public programming at BMI and the Writer’s Block. Her first foray into fiction, "The Ice Seller of Hell," won the 2024 Elizabeth Alexander Award and led to a residency at Smith College.
About Black Mountain Institute
Black Mountain Institute champions writers and storytellers through programs, fellowships and community engagement. From the brightest spot on the planet, Black Mountain Institute amplifies writing and artistic expression to connect us to each other in the Las Vegas Valley, the Southwest, and beyond. For more information about BMI, please visit the .
