The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Somto Ihezue, Urvashi Bahuguna, Naomi Leung, and Chisom Okafor as the recipients of our Summer 2025 Residency Fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Winner of Fellowship for Black and/or Indigenous Writers & Winner of Support Grant for Black and/or Indigenous Writers
Somto Ihezue (He/Him) is an Igbo writer, editor, and filmmaker. His works have appeared, or are forthcoming in Reactor, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, POETRY magazine, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, NIGHTMARE, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, Flash Fiction Online, and others. His work has been shortlisted and nominated for the British Fantasy Award (Sydney J. Bounds Awards), the Nommo Awards, the Utopia Awards, the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award. He is a Creative Writing MFA student at the University of Maryland, and has received residencies, scholarships, and grants from Tin House, Clarion West, Milford SF, Horror Writers Association, and ArtsAMP. He is the assistant editor of the NEArts/SFWA-sponsored Publishing Taught Me Anthology, and co-editor of Will This Be A Problem: The Anthology.
Winners of Fellowships for Writers of Color
Naomi Leung 梁珮恩(they/them) is a Han Cantonese settler, climate justice education facilitator and organizer, and mixed media artist. Naomi has a background in organizing for climate justice education programming and policy change with UBC Climate Hub, UBC Sustainability, The Climate Justice Organizing HUB, Sustainabiliteens, Climate Education Reform BC, Asha Collective, and Be the Change Earth Alliance. As a queer and genderqueer racialized artist and organizer, they intimately know the gap in funding and mental health support for their own communities’ wellbeing. Naomi desires to create anti-colonial spaces centering trans and queer diaspora to process intergenerational trauma, grief, and to co-create possibilities and programming for hope and healing. Naomi is a senior researcher in the psychology of climate justice with Dr Lauren Emberson at UBC also studying BSc Global Resource Systems and Psychology. In their studies, they integrate climate change studies with global health, the study of climate emotions, and the Asian diaspora. Naomi’s photography has been exhibited in The James Black Gallery, North Van Arts, Hatch Art Gallery, and the Imagination for Liberation art show.
Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and essayist, and the author of Terrarium (The (Great Indian Poetry Collective, 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin Indian, 2021). Her most recent writing can be found in Passages North, Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, Androit, Copper Nickel and SWWIM.
Winner of Support Grant for Black and/or Indigenous Writers
Chisom Okafor is the author of Winged Witnesses (University of Nebraska Press) and the chapbook, All I Know About a Heavy Heart Is How to Carry It (Jacar Press). He has received nominations for the CAAPP Book Prize, the Brunel Prize, Gerald Kraak Prize and Pushcart Prize. He has also received support from the Commonwealth Foundation. He presently lives in Tuscaloosa where he is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the University of Alabama.
Finalists for this summer’s fellowships include Tolu Daniel, Ariana Matondo, Lucie Pereira, Mahta Riazi, Topaz Winters, Sara Shirazian, and Madina Tuhbatullina.
