Frances Lee and Stephanie Segura awarded Hugo Fellowships

IAS alumni Frances Lee (Master of Arts in Cultural Studies) and Stephanie Segura (MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics) were recently awarded Hugo Fellowships for 2020-21. The Hugo Fellowship supports emerging writers, providing space and resources to four to six fellows in the Seattle area to complete a proposed project.

Lee is working on a collection of essays drawing on their experience as an activist in local and national movements to consider the nuances of activist culture, critique its dogma, and draw out ethical practices and core values that sustain activists and organizers over the long haul.

Segura will be using the fellowship to finish her multi-media poetry manuscript, Open Door Behind You, a genealogy of generational trauma, memory, and dysfunctionality. The experimental writing in this manuscript examines what it means to inherit trauma and the ways in which it affects memory and the histories we pass down.

Segura was also recently chosen as a 2020 Scholar for LitFUSE, an annual poets’ workshop in Tieton.