The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce writers Brianna Yancey, Diya Abbas, Topaz Winters, and Bianca Alyssa Pérez as the recipients of our Summer 2026 Residency Fellowships. Meghan Malachi and Brianna Yancey are the winners of our summer travel grants for Black and/or Indigenous Writers. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Fellowship for Black and/or Indigenous Writers & Travel Grant Winner
Brianna Yancey is from Elon, North Carolina. She is a poet and lecturer at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. She received a dual bachelor’s degree in English and Sociology from UNC-Greensboro. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Queens University of Charlotte. In 2023, she received her Master’s in English and African American literature from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. She is a 2023 recipient of the AWP HBCU Fellowship and has been published in The Coraddi and Lucky Jefferson. Her poetry explores Black womanhood and memory, through a nonlinear, impressionistic lens. It blurs past and present, braiding the sacred with the ordinary, and centers voices shaped by resilience, inheritance, and becoming. Brianna is also an artist (currently using paint and pastels), an amateur baker, and a lover of music.
Smokelong Quarterly Fellowship for Trans Writers Winner
Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani Butch from the Midwest. Her poems and essays can be found in Sinister Wisdom, Adroit, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly and others. She believes the poem is a clock. The poem makes time. Find more of her muses at diyabbas.com.
Fellowship Winners for Writers of Color
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), which won the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & was a 2025 Sealey Challenge Pick & LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022. Her debut poetry collection, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024), was a finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes. Topaz’s poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, & others. Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA & the National YoungArts Foundation. She serves as the editor-in-chief at Half Mystic Press & lives between New York & Singapore.
Bianca Alyssa Pérez is a poet & educator born and raised in South Texas. Her chapbook, Gemini Gospel, was the winner of Host Publication‘s Chapbook Contest in Spring 2023. Her work is published in these beautiful places: Porter House Review, Infrarrealista Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Praisesong for the People Anthology (edited by Amanda Johnston),The Texas Observer, The Baltimore Review. & forthcoming in an anthology from The University of Nevada Press and The Bangalore Review. She is also the co-host of the horror podcast, Basement Girls, with writer, Steph Grossman. Find more chisme at her website: biancaalyssaperez.com
Travel Grant Winner
Meghan Malachi is a poet and writer from The Bronx, New York. She is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor’s Prize Contest and runner-up to the 2024 Princemere Poetry Prize. Her debut collection No Lace Fronts in Iowa City was selected by Allison Joseph as runner-up to Madville Publishing’s 2024 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in June 2026. Meghan has been a finalist for the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Trio Book Award, the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, and the Gasher Press Book Award. She is an Associate Editor at RHINO, and she lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships were Silas Heying, Lam Ho, Dani Janae, Mylo Lam, Leila Lois, Tamara MC, Siddisse Negero, Jessica Nirvana Ram, Ty Raso, and Lily Zhou.
