The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Olajide Omojarabi, Michal ‘MJ’ Jones, Sarah-Joy Milner, and Rasha Abdulhadi as the recipients of our Fall 2025 Residency Fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Black and/or Indigenous Writers Fellowship Recipient
Olajide Omojarabi’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Ploughshares, Off Assignment, Barren Magazine, and adda. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Trans Writers Fellowship Recipient
Michal ‘MJ’ Jones (they/he) is a poet, parent, and editor living in Oakland, CA. Their poetry has appeared in the American Academy of Poets, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Muzzle Magazine, TriQuarterly Review, ANMLY, & elsewhere. Their debut collection of poetry, HOOD VACATIONS, won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of a chapbook, SOFT ARMOR (2023), from Black Lawrence Press.
Women and Nonbinary Writers Recipients
Sarah-Joy Milner is an Afro-Indigenous Odawa and Oglala Lakota poet and educator from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She holds fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Indigenous Nations Poets, and her work is forthcoming in Yellow Medicine Review. A Tin House Summer Workshop participant, her work explores cycles, beginnings, and reclamation. She currently resides in Tampa, Florida, where she is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of South Florida as a graduate fellow.
Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you, even as you hear this, to join them in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, whether it’s a handful or a fingernail full, throw it now. Get in the way however you can. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. We can refuse it every day, every hour, with our every breath and action. We must.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships were Saima Afreen, Oladosu Michael Emerald, Ernest Chigaemezu Ohia, Leslie Pyo, Tyler Raso, Jessica Rowe, Chandanie Somwaru, Emily Rose Soreghan, Rose Torres, and meagan washington.
Applications are now open for our Spring 2026 residency period. Find out more about our spring fellowships here.
