Writer-at- risk
The Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency is offered annually to a writer at risk in their home country: a year of peace, a space to write, and the vibrant Northwest Arkansas artistic community.
current writer in residence
Uchenna Awoke
Nsukka, Nigeria
Artist Protection Fund Fellow and Inaugural Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk, Uchenna Awoke is a fiction writer from Nsukka, Nigeria. He has been awarded an IIE Artist Protection Fund Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center, and was a 2019 Graywolf Africa Prize finalist. His short stories have appeared in Transition, Elsewhere Lit, The Evergreen Review and other journals. His first novel, The Liquid Eye of a Moon, has been described as a Nigerian Catcher in the Rye, narrated by a teenage boy whose desire to pull his family out of poverty takes him to Lagos, where he deepens his knowledge of social segregation, and reckons with his anger at the systems that have oppressed his family. It is out now from Catapult in the US and Scribe in the UK.
About the program
The Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program provides each invitee with travel funds, visa assistance, employment, housing, professional contacts, language training (if needed) and any other necessity toward rebuilding a life, career and writing practice, free from persecution.
Each visiting writer’s work will be featured in an issue of the Arkansas International. As part of their writer-in-residence duties, they will additionally, according to their preferences, offer a seminar or curate a special folio for the Arkansas International. Northwest Arkansas’s active community of readers will also benefit from readings, talks or workshops by the writer at public libraries and other cultural institutions throughout the region.
This residency is supported by the Artist Protection Fund (APF); the University of Arkansas Chancellor’s Fund; the University of Arkansas’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation; the Fayetteville Public Library; and members of the Arkansas International Writers-at-Risk Community Advisory Committee.
Artist Protection Fund (APF), an initiative of Institute of International Education, fills a critical unmet need by protecting threatened artists and placing them at welcoming host institutions in safe countries where they can continue their work and plan for their futures. APF places these artists in safe havens for a full year and provides fellowship funding, mentoring, and inclusion in a comprehensive network of artistic and social support.
The Arkansas International Writers-at-Risk Residency Program was founded by novelist, translator, and professor Padma Viswanathan.