Introducing our 2021 Winter Fellows for Writing Downtown Residency

We’re thrilled to announce the next four fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Dominica Phetteplace, Jane Pek, Kit Yan, Christopher Molnar, and Alex Jennings.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment next to Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.

This year’s apartment will be in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Dominica Phetteplace - Jan 2021

Dominica Phetteplace writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Asimov's, Zyzzyva, Clarkesworld and Lightspeed. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University.

Jane Pek - FEB 2021

Jane Pek was born and raised in Singapore, and now lives in New York. During the day (and sometimes night) she works as a lawyer at an investment company. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brooklyn Review, Witness, and Conjunctions. Her debut novel The Verifiers is forthcoming from Vintage in 2022. She enjoys picking up different martial arts without being very good at any of them, reading coming-of-age novels, watching contemporary theatre, and cycling around the city in search of superlative almond croissants.

About her project: I will be revising a draft of my second novel, tentatively titled The Immersionist. The Immersionist is a literary science-fiction/wuxia quest narrative, set in a futuristic Singapore and a history-on-steroids version of medieval China, that explores class, migration and what it means to be human in an era of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and vast economic inequality. There will be swordfighting.

Philiane Phang - March 2021

Philiane Phang is a writer and director based in New York. She was recognized as the recipient of the Film Independent Ammon Foundation Fellowship at the Spirit Awards and awarded IFP’s Inaugural Phosphate Prize for a screenplay with a strong and complex female lead. Her short film, Gubagude Ko, starring Academy Award winner, Mahershala Ali, and developed with the support of American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women is currently airing on HBO. In 2017, Conde Nast and Indigenous Media commissioned her to write and direct a proof of concept for a TV series, The Row. Her feature project, The Space Between, was chosen to participate in Sundance Screenwriters Intensive, Sundance Producing Lab, Film Independent Screenwriting Lab, Film Independent Directing Lab, Berlinale Talents and Co-Production Market, and IFP’s - No Borders Co-Production Market. Philiane graduated from Rutgers University with a Juris Doctorate.

About her project: I am adapting Robert McCammon's short story 'The Deep End' into a feature film. The story follows a grief-stricken father who descends into madness after his son's mysterious death.

Christopher Molnar - April 2021

Chris Molnar is co-founder of the Writer's Block bookstore in Las Vegas. He is also founder and editorial director of Archway Editions, the new literary imprint of powerHouse Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, that is publishing authors such as Ishmael Reed, Alice Notley and Paul Schrader.

He is a graduate of the Columbia University School of the Arts MFA program in fiction, editor of Unpublishable and the upcoming Archways anthologies (and organizer of their corresponding event series), and his writing has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn and The Shadow, among others.

About his project: My novel, Heaven’s Oblivion, is about the notorious model and stalker Nell Theobald. Perhaps most well known for being mauled by a lion during the 1966 International Automobile Show in New York City, she subsequently used the settlement money to fly around the world following the opera singer Birgit Nilsson. Inspired in part by the obscure novel Of Lena Geyer, which features a mysterious woman in black who always sits in the front row of an opera singer's performances, Theobald went beyond obsession into theft and forgery, sneaking into Nilsson's hotel rooms to steal mementos and letterhead, writing letters to herself as Nilsson using Nilsson’s stationary and with an eerily accurate eye towards her grammatical and linguistic tics.

Alex Jennings - May 2021

Alex Jennings is a teacher, author, and performer living in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in strangehorizons.com, podcastle, The Peauxdunque Review, Obsidian Lit, the Locus-Award-winning Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, as well as numerous anthologies including Stories for Chip, New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and Spicy Slipstream Stories. His debut collection, Here I Come and Other Stories was released by Fight On! Publications in 2012. He was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) and raised in Gaborone (Botswana), Paramaribo (Surinam), and Tunis (Tunisia) as well as the United States. Find out more at alexjennings.net.

About his project: Currently at work on an SF novella, multiple short stories/poetry, and an as-yet-untitled novel project which is under contract with Orbit/Redhook.

This novel is a sort of blaxploitation Pippi Longstocking musical set in New Orleans. The next novel slated is currently called All The Scenes, and it set in an alterrnate 90s Tunisia at the American Cooperative School while war rages elsewhere in the solar system.

Kit Yan

Kit Yan is a Yellow American New York based artist, born in Enping, China, and raised in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Kit is a Vivace Award winner for big ideas in musical theater, a 2020 Musical Theater Factory Makers Fellow, a 2020 Playwright’s Center fellow, 2020 Company One/Pao Arts Fellow, 2020 Lincoln Center Writer in residence, and former Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow and MacDowell Fellow.

Their work has been produced by the American Repertory Theater, the Smithsonian, NAMT, Musical Theater Factory, the New York Musical Festival, Mixed Blood, and Diversionary Theater.

About their project: T(estoserone): a new musical. Interstate: a new musical.

Update: Due to Hawaii Border restrictions during the pandemic, Kit was unable to join us for March 2021, as previously scheduled.

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Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown@plympton.com.

To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com

Plympton with Amazon Original Stories Announce Faraway, a Collection of Fairy Tales for the Here and Now

Fairy tales have always been a way to escape into another world, one full of magic and mystery, chance encounters with creatures good and evil, and adventures around every corner. For these unprecedented modern times, Plympton teamed up with Amazon Original Stories to explore how traditional fairy tales would look in the “here and now,” and how the role of myths and legends has transformed our cultural, historical, and literary landscape. What new wisdom could a modern folktale depart upon a contemporary reader? How can the classic morals endemic to fairy tales be conveyed in fresh and different ways? And what would a fairy tale look like today, in a world that seems so futuristic compared to the days of yore?

We contributed three stories to Faraway to examine how fairy tales would look in an experimental modern setting. The collection of five mystical, suspenseful, and fantastical short stories imagines an upside-down world where villains and heroes clash, the past and present collide, and monsters hide in high schools and house parties.

Ken Liu’s story from the collection, titled The Cleaners, has been optioned by Amazon Studios and is currently in development as a television series. Liu’s piece, which is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, will be produced in association with Orlando Bloom’s studio, Amazing Owl, with Bloom executive producing the series. Other names working on the project include Dominic Orlando, writer of The OA and Mindhunter, and producer Adam Karasick, along with Liu himself executive producing.

This is not Liu’s first foray into the television production world. From Deadline, “His short story The Message is being developed as a feature film by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment, while [his short story series] Good Hunting became an episode of Netflix’s animated series Love, Death + Robots and AMC’s Pantheon is adapted from his interconnected series of short stories.”

The Cleaners tells of a near-future world where inanimate objects carry traces of the memories of their previous owners, with treasured or controversial objects carrying intense, even painful memories of their past. Certain people who possess a special power can relive these memories by touching the objects, and some work as cleaners, scrubbing the old memories from objects so that they can become new and untainted. Liu’s story follows a young man working as a cleaner at his family’s business as he undertakes a strange new cleaning project on a mysterious set of items.

Our other two stories in the collection include:

Rainbow Rowell’s The Prince and the Troll, a love story about a normal man who falls for a beautiful yet mysterious troll who lives under a bridge. As he struggles to bring her out of her shell — and out from the mud she’s covered in — they develop a heartwarming connection that challenges their previously-unrelated lifestyles. How can two creatures from such different worlds learn to live side by side? Rowell is the author of the Simon Snow series and the bestselling novel Eleanor & Park. 

Gayle Foreman’s hilarious story The Wickeds, which revisits the mothers of Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel. Foreman is the author of If I Stay, the number-one bestselling novel that was adapted into the 2014 film of the same name. Clever and subversive, this story examines the forgotten lives of the “evil” mothers and “wicked” women that lurk in the background of many classic fairy tales. The three disgraced mothers set out to retell their stories and right the wrongs of history in this funny, feminist tale.

There are two final stories that round out the collection: 

Author of the New York Times number-one bestselling novel Dear Martin, Nic Stone takes on the enduring tale of Hansel and Gretel in his harrowing story Hazel and Gray. When two teenagers get lost in the woods on the way back from their romantic date, they are relieved to stumble upon a house full of people. However, they quickly realize that they are not as safe as they thought when the party inside turns sinister, and monsters from home await them in the dark.

A twisted murder mystery unfolds in the halls of a high school in Soman Chianani’s story The Princess Game. The author of the bestselling series The School for Good and Evil revisits the teenage drama in this frightening tale, where the most popular girls in school keep turning up dead, each killed in the theme of a different classic fairy tale. Two juvenile detectives must go undercover and try to catch the killer...before it’s too late. 

Each story in Faraway is available for purchase in eBook and audiobook format, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members. It is the latest collection of stories Plympton has contributed to in collaboration with Amazon Original Stories. Recent collections include Out of Line, a collection of feminist fiction; Hush, a collection about the end of truth; and Inheritance, a collection about family secrets.

New Location, New Fellows for our 2020 Writing Residency in Las Vegas

We’re resuming our writer’s residency with COVID safety measures in place. This winter, four new Writing Downtown fellows will join us in Las Vegas: Meredith Alloway, Jenn Alandy Trahan, and Zin E. Rocklyn.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore

The next year’s apartment will be in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Meredith Alloway - November 2020

Meredith Alloway is a Texas native who currently resides in NYC as a filmmaker and journalist. Her short film RIDE, was commissioned by Hulu & Sundance institute and is currently streaming now on Hulu. Her film DEEP TISSUE premiered at SXSW in 2019 and has played festivals such as AFI, Bucheon, and Overlook. It’s currently out streaming now on Future of Film is Female.  As a journalist, she has written interviews and feature pieces for Vanity Fair, Playboy, Filmmaker Magazine, Nylon, Indiewire, Flaunt and was Senior Editor of The Script Lab.  Her feature film HIGH PRIESTESS is currently in development with David S. Goyer’s company, Phantom Four.

Her current project: She's currently writing a horror script.

Jenn Alandy Trahan - December 2020

Jenn Alandy Trahan was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in Fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her writing has been supported by the Carlisle Family Scholarship at the Community of Writers, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland. Jenn is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she has taught undergraduate courses in fiction, nonfiction, Filipinx fiction, creative expression, and service-learning through creative writing; she's also taught Writer's Studio workshops on writing about sports, class, and race.

Her current project: A book featuring characters from her short story "They Told Us Not to Say This," published in Harper's in August 2018 and selected for Best American Short Stories 2019, as well as characters from her short story "Les Hommes de Foi," published in the lovely UNM-student-run lit mag, Blue Mesa Review.

Zin E. Rocklyn - January 2021

Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story "Summer Skin" in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax's Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story "Night Sun" was published on Tor.com. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2021 Clarion West candidate. You can find them on Twitter @intelligentwat.

About their project: I will be working on my Dark Fantasy novel which is a riff on Cinderella if she were a Black Queer mercenary who was betrayed by her father.

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Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown@plympton.com.

To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com

Plympton and Amazon Original Stories Announce Hush, a Collection of Stories About the End of Truth

The quest for truth has always taken us to places never before imagined—and often, reveals that the line between truth and lie is not so clear as it may have once seemed. In an age in which truth is blurred beyond recognition, in which elaborate plots, schemes, and illusions undermine the integrity and stability of our lives, Plympton was inspired to examine our modern-day “end of truth” and the ongoing struggle to revive it. What secrets are being concealed? Who is to be trusted? How, if at all, are we to uncover the most dangerous of hidden truths?

To help us explore these questions, we asked six award-winning crime writers to dramatize the end of truth. Hush, a collection of six grippingly urgent and timely short stories, shines a light on the darkest corners of society, in whose shadows secrets hide, conspiracies lurk, and deception runs rampant.

The collection was conceived and edited by Johnathan Santlofer. Santlofer is the author of the bestselling and award-winning novels The Death Artist and Anatomy of Fear, and the celebrated memoir The Widower's Notebook. He has edited seven story collections and the New York Times bestselling serial novel Inherit the Dead. His latest novel The Last Mona Lisa will be published in 2021. 

About Hush, Santlofer said “In the age of fake news, the idea of truth seemed to me the perfect subject for stories. What an honor it was to put together this collection and work with these terrific writers, all of whom took my theme of ‘truth’ and used it to create the most fascinating and galvanizing stories.”

The result is a collection of stories that range from the sinister to the spine-tingling, from mystery to thriller, by authors with distinctly different voices and styles but united in their prowess and mastery of suspense.

In “Snowflakes,” Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10 and  Snowflakes, details the harrowing account of a young woman who, threatened by an unknown force and pressed by her father’s paranoia, prepares to fend off a violent infiltration of her once sheltered existence.

Winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite explores the ominous side of social media fame with “Treasure,” in which one woman’s quest for online notoriety lands her in the path of a desperate fan—one willing to do anything it takes to get to her.

Laura Lippman, bestselling author of Lady in the Lake and winner of over twenty awards for crime fiction, brings us “Slow Burner,” an unflinching gaze at the disintegration of a marriage and the secrets that threaten to rend it apart.

Author of The Goodbye Man and more than forty other internationally bestselling novels, Jeffrey Deaver takes us back to the days of old-school, mano a mano reporting. “Buried” follows soon to be retired journalist Edward Fitzhugh through a maze of riddles, clues, and lies on his hunt for a serial kidnapper and, ultimately, the final, best story of his career.

“The Gift,” by bestselling author of If I Die Tonight Alison Gaylin, is the disquieting account of an eight-year-old child gone missing. Left with no choice but to consult a mysterious psychic for answers, the desperate parents are forced to question the limits of their trust and the measures—supernatural and otherwise—they’ll take to bring back their daughter.

In the collection’s final story, “Let Her Be,” Lisa Unger, bestselling author of Confessions on the 7:45, tells the story of a suspicious ex-boyfriend seeking to confirm his theory that his former lover isn’t leading the perfect life she portrays on social media—only to find she may not be the only one in danger.

Hush is available for purchase as a Kindle eBook and an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members. It is the fourth collection of stories Plympton has conceived, commissioned, and edited in collaboration with Amazon Original Stories. Previous collections include Warmer, a collection of climate fiction; Disorder, a collection of social suspense stories; and Inheritance, a collection about family secrets.

Plympton and Amazon Original Stories Announce Inheritance, a Collection of Family Secrets

Secrets are a family tradition. They are also the stuff of great short stories. We live in a time when we can trace our ancestry through a saliva sample, FaceTime with relatives on the other side of the globe, and create new families of our own making in ways that were once unthinkable. And yet, unspoken desires and dangerous revelations can still threaten our shared lives. With this in mind, we invited five fiction masters to explore the tangled relations that arise from family secrets. They responded with emotionally resonant stories that consider the realities of inheritance and the consequences of hidden histories.

Alice Hoffman, the New York Times bestselling author of The World That We Knew, brings us a haunting story of loyalty, betrayal, and a young woman’s coming-of-age in early 1900s Massachusetts in Everything My Mother Taught Me.

In Can You Feel This? Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio, takes us into the chaos of a maternity ward, where an anxious mother-to-be grapples with memories of tragedy as she balances her child’s needs with her own healing.

The author of The Lion’s Den, Anthony Marra, imagines what happens when a son exposes his father’s transgressions in a tell-all and then slinks back home to see him face-to-face.

Jennifer Haigh’s The Zenith Man explores the chilling speculation surrounding a local couple in a captivating story that could only have come from the writer behind such bestselling book as Heat and Light.

And finally, in The Weddings, Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night, portrays a fortysomething gay man who is confronted with his secret past when he receives a wedding invitation from an old college friend. 

Inheritance is available for purchase as either a Kindle eBook or an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members.

Plympton and Amazon Original Stories Announce Disorder, a Collection of Social Suspense

These are unsettling times. And in unsettling times we often look to fiction to cast a wider perspective and help us see past our day-to-day struggles to the larger context. This was the idea behind Disorder — to use the tropes of the thriller to cast some of our current daily horrors into new relief. The writers we approached were not typical thriller writers; instead we went to some of today's most interesting literary writers and asked them to try their hands at works of suspense that arose out of their own civic fears. Luckily, they were game.

Real-world horrors and ghoulish fictions mix to startling effect in these six works of social suspense meant to entertain, unsettle, and pique in equal measure. If newspaper headlines sat around telling scary stories around the campfire, this is what they would sound like.

Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, uses a deceptively simple story to lay bare the logical conclusion of a society that values its sons over its daughters in "The Best Girls." 

The author of Beasts of No Nation, Uzo Iweala, takes us deep inside the mind of a man losing hold on his sense of self after a case of mistaken identity sends him on a Kafkaesque journey through the underworld of the US immigration system in "Anonymous."

In “Loam”, Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin, brings us a chilling tale in which the monstrous effects of pedophilia and ghostly revenge are amplified by small town narrow-mindedness.

Lauren Beukes’ “Ungirls” explores the world of Incels in a twisted, terrifying, and ultimately empowering story that could only have come from the writer behind such bestselling books as Motherland.

In “The Beckoning Fair One”, bestselling author of ll Will, Dan Chaon, weaves a coming-of-age story that will keep you up nights wondering whether everything feels just a little too familiar.

And finally, in “Will Williams” Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift, takes an Edgar Allen Poe classic about döppelgangers and moral degradation and reshapes it into a scathing portrait of the schools-to-prison pipeline that treats young black men as fungible — often by turning them against each other.

The entire collection is available as a one-click free download for Amazon Prime members. We are honored that this was the Amazon Original Stories collection selected to launch on Prime Day.

The Writer’s Block Bookstore Reopens at the Lucy in Downtown Las Vegas.

Our partner for the Writing Downtown residencies, The Writer’s Block Bookstore in Downtown Las Vegas, has reopened its store at a new location, The Lucy, with the support of Beverly Rogers. We’re super excited for a creative and innovative space come to life. The new store is over three times the size, has more than five times the number of books, features a coffee shop, and offers an expanded variety of workshops for young students.  The Lucy features a number of residential units that will host writers and artists.

As longtime fans and friends of the team behind The Writer’s Block, we are thrilled to watch it grow.

Read more about the opening in the Las Vegas Weekly.

Check out this wonderful new abode for book-lovers:

Credit: Emily Wilson

Credit: Emily Wilson

Credit: Emily Wilson

Credit: Emily Wilson

Credit: Emily Wilson

Welcoming Spring 2019 Fellows to Our Las Vegas Writers Residency

We’re thrilled to announce our next Writing Downtown fellows, Sarah Wang, Jennifer Parr, and Leah Johnson, who joins us via our partnership with Catapult.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Sarah Wang - march 2019

Sarah Wang is a writer from Los Angeles who currently splits her time between New York and the West Coast. She won a Nelson Algren runner-up prize for fiction in 2016 and has performed at and received commissions from the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement in Geneva, Switzerland, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in France, the New Museum, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. She has written for BOMB, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Catapult, Conjunctions, Stonecutter Journal, Story Magazine, The Third Rail, Ugly Duckling Presse, semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter, Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder, The Shanghai Literary Review, Black Clock, Performa Magazine, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, and The Last Newspaper at the New Museum, among other publications. See more of her writing at wangsarah.com

Leah Johnson - April 2019

Leah Johnson is a writer, educator and hopeless Midwesterner currently moonlighting as a New Yorker. She's the Social Media Editor at Electric Lit and a Contributing Editor at Catapult. Leah received her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2018 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work—which can be found at Bustle, Electric Lit, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Establishment and elsewhere—is centered on the miracle and magic of black womanhood. Her debut YA novel is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2020.

About her project:

Set amidst a Flint-like water crisis in Lincoln, Indiana, WHO THE EARTH IS FOR is a YA novel that follows 17-year-old Free Jackson as she navigates her senior year in a town that the world seems to have forgotten and a family that can’t survive without her. Free’s dream of finally “escaping” her hometown and going to college are derailed when she discovers that her lifelong best friend is pregnant and needs help taking care of the baby. With the help of a new boy with a bright smile that hides secrets of his own, Free must ultimately answer the question: Is there a way to take care of the people and the place that raised you when the only thing you want to do is leave them?

Jennifer Parr - May 2019

I graduated with honors with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Tampa in 2006. As a former elementary school teacher, I have a passion and gift for working with children. I am currently working on a middle grade fantasy novel called THE ROYAL GAMES. I also am a contributing author of Amazon bestseller “365 Days of Angel Prayers” and founder of Asheville Writing Collective, a local writing community in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.

I will be working on THE ROYAL GAMES, a middle grade fantasy novel, currently at approximately 14,000 words and estimated to be 45,000 upon completion.

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Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown @ plympton.com.

To find out even more, visit www.writingdowntown.com

Welcoming New Film Fellows to our Las Vegas Writing Residency

We’re excited to announce new film Writing Downtown Fellows in partnership with Woodside, our sister organization that focuses on encouraging film.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects. Fellows live in a fully furnished apartment near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.

Special thanks again to the Woodside community, Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Anthony Onah, February 2019

Anthony Onah is a Nigerian-American filmmaker who grew up in the Philippines, England, Nigeria, Togo and the U.S. His debut feature, THE PRICE, premiered at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival in the Narrative Feature Competition, and was released in theaters in November 2017. Onah graduated from Harvard, where he studied biochemistry and neuroscience, then earned an MFA in film directing from UCLA. He was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s list of “25 New Faces of Film” in 2015, and is an alum of the Sundance Institute Catalyst Forum.

About his project: A feature-length screenplay titled GOLIATH. The logline: “After a brilliant African American scientist discovers a leading pesticide may be harmful, paranoia and rage threaten to consume him as he battles its manufacturer, the most powerful chemical company in the world. Based on a true story.”

LaTajh Simmons-Weaver, June 2019

LaTajh Weaver is an award winning Black writer and director based in Oakland, California. She is dedicated to reclaiming and telling authentic stories of LGBTQIA and Black communities. Her latest project, CYCLES web series follows a youth advocate worker and a young gang member as they search for their purpose while also trying to survive Oakland, California, where the murder rate averages at 92 per year. Currently, LaTajh is working on her next script and assisting student filmmakers on their projects.

Her current project: LaTajh will be working on a feature length screenplay centered around a group of kids from Oakland, California and their relationship to the school to prison pipeline.

Corey Asraf, July 2018

Corey has a multidisciplinary background working as a graphic artist, editor, writer, and director. At the age of 13 Corey wrote and directed his first short film. Since that time he has collaborated with various artists and musicians to create a variety of music videos, commercials and short films. After the Cannes premiere of his short film Judas' Chariot (2014), he went on to direct his first feature film, Let Me Make You A Martyr ( ft. Marylin Manson, Michael Potts, Mark Boone Jr, Niko Nicotera) - which was acquired by Filmrise and released June 6th in theaters and on VOD. He is currently writing a screenplay based on the rise and fall of his fathers criminal empire in 1990's Miami.

His current project: A screenplay based on the rise and fall of my fathers criminal empire in 1990's Miami. After a hurricane in Miami, his father faked his death, fled the country and lived in exile in Morocco. Soon after his disappearance, Corey was employed by his father to smuggle conflict diamonds into the United States. This is his story.

Alex Marx, January 2018

Alex Marx is an actor, writer, filmmaker and philanthropist born and bred in London. After graduating with an MA in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh he trained as an actor in New York before returning home to continue his training in Meisner technique (which he now teaches). For the last decade he has worked as a jobbing actor in West End theatre, BBC television and international independent cinema. He has also written, directed and produced four short films - and is currently working on his debut feature Miraculous Isabella (due to shoot 2019), as well as a number of other projects.

His current project: Miraculous Isabella is a dramatic biopic about style icon Isabella Blow, famous for her discovery of some of the leading names in fashion and her lifelong, losing battle with the demons of mental illness. 

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Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown @ plympton.com.

To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com

Plympton and Amazon Original Stories Release Warmer, a Collection of Climate Fiction

For the better part of a year we’ve been quietly at work on a project that we’re thrilled to announce has come to fruition just in time for this year's season of hurricanes, Nor'easters, and California wildfires—or, as it's sometimes known, the holiday season.

Warmer, our collection of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), has just been published by Amazon Original Stories. Featuring original works by National Book Award Finalists Lauren Groff and Jess Walter, Pulitzer Prize Winner Jane Smiley, New York Times bestselling authors Edan Lepucki and Jesse Kellerman, as well as masters of short fiction Skip Horack and Sonya Larson, the collection is an attempt to examine and reflect on one of our era’s most pressing existential crises.

We conceived and pitched the project to Amazon in hopes of offering fiction writers a voice with which to consider our present planetary moment and imagine its potential futures. The authors, whose work Plympton commissioned and co-founder Yael Goldstein Love edited, were excited by the opportunity to contribute their own interpretations of clarity and caution to the ongoing global warming conversation. The result is a collection of stories that both stand on their own and engage with one another, whose plots are at once startlingly strange and frighteningly conceivable.

Whereas most stories about climate change tend to be speculative in genre, the stories in Warmer shine a light on very real human relationships strained by an increasingly warming planet: boiling heat in winter stokes resentments between a bedridden mother and her son; springtime sleet in Mississippi inspires climate scientists at an open bar to party like there’s no tomorrow; a girl growing up on Cape Cod explores the collectible debris of a world she’s too young to remember. And while most cli-fi is wholly dystopian in outlook, our collection ultimately aims to sow visions of hope—if not optimism—and of trepidation in equal measure.

Warmer is available for purchase as either a Kindle eBook or an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members. This is only the first of several Amazon Original Studios collection that Plympton will be commissioning and editing. Collections of Family Secrets, Social Suspense, and Feminist Fiction are all in the works, and will continue to build on our passion for socially relevant fiction.

Enjoy the stories, and keep an eye out for more. We'll be hard at work, right up until the end of the world.