Just Buffalo Literary Center invites poets to write in Buffalo this summer

Applications now open for 2025 poetry fellowship, judged by Donika Kelly.

Press Release

Applications are now open for Just Buffalo Literary Center’s poetry fellowship, judged in 2025 by Donika Kelly. The award, which is open to adult poets of all ages and career stages, includes a $2,000 honorarium; a month-long Buffalo residency in August; and the opportunity to perform as a featured reader alongside Kelly at Just Buffalo’s acclaimed Silo City Reading Series.

“It's going to sound like an exaggeration if I say my time in Buffalo felt life-changing, but it's not,” said Diana Cao, the 2024 poetry fellow. “I've never had four straight weeks dedicated to reading and writing for my own projects. The time and space allowed me to imagine/pushed me to imagine ways I could keep making time and space for my work and for other ways of being.”

The JBLC poetry fellowship was established in 2020 as a way of raising the visibility of both the selected poetry fellow and the City of Buffalo as a home and destination for innovative literary arts in the U.S. Now in its sixth year, the fellowship has previously honored Keith S. Wilson in 2020, Porsha Olayiwola in 2021, Ashia Ajani in 2022, Ae Hee Lee in 2023, and Diana Cao in 2024.

This year’s judge, Kelly, is the author of “The Renunciations” (Graywolf Press), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry; and “Bestiary” (Graywolf Press), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award.

A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has received an NEA fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Kelly lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

The deadline for applications is Feb. 27; the 2025 Poetry Fellow will be announced in mid-April. Fellowship details, application guidelines and eligibility requirements are available at justbuffalo.org.

Just Buffalo Literary Center’s mission is to create and strengthen communities through the literary arts. For over 45 years, the organization has brought groundbreaking writers to Buffalo, hosted poetry events and readings, and supported the development of young writers. For more information, visit justbuffalo.org.