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is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells, won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing, and was shortlisted for the Ursula Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Collection. She earned her B.A. at Cornell University and her M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black writers. She is currently working on her second book, Godsflower, an Afrosurrealist postcolonial fable set in New Zimbabwe, a fictional country haunted by its resurrected dictator. This project uses the narrative structure of Ngano (Zimbabwean fabulism) to chronicle the absurdities of living under an authoritarian regime while also imagining a world in which these regimes fall.
A fiction and architecture writer living in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the novel The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos. His work has also appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Offing, Forever Magazine, Electric Literature, Triangle House Review, and Joyland. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Rodrigo is currently at work on his second novel, Bruto, an incisive psychological portrayal of a retired Spanish fútbol manager amid personal ruin. With this project, he seeks to interrogate legacies of masculinity through the lens of sport and psychology, as well as chronicle the overlapping ways in which identity, family, and nation are continuously forged.
The author of The Traces: An Essay. Her work has been published by The Believer, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review, among others, and has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy. She is at work on a second book of nonfiction, Twice Written: A Marriage in Eight Translations, which considers the word faithfulness as it appears in translation, religion, and marriage, that co-authored text.
The author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Wilson’s writing has appeared in The Baffler, Esquire, Time, Orion, and BOMB, among other publications. He is Assistant Professor of creative writing and American literature at Wagner College. His current book-in-progress, Queer Woods: An Essay in Deviance, explores the intersecting crises of democratic space, queer living, and ecological consciousness through the lens of cruising for sex. Beginning with a personal narrative of cruising in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Queer Woods ventures into wider issues: the troubled line between public and private, the status of the “natural” in queer culture, and the right to green space and pleasure under increasingly authoritarian regimes. By interweaving memoir with cultural history, queer ecology, sociology, and art history, the book challenges conventional genre boundaries, combining the erotic with the intellectual. He lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
A founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the M.F.A. faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He currently lives in Chicago, where he is working on The Census Taker, a speculative noir novel that follows the work of a Quechua entomologist in the Amazon and her son, a census taker in Chicago who documents disappeared peoples following a coup. To support the novel, Zapata will partner with AmazonFACE, a conservation and biodiversity organization, to research the devastating impacts of colonization in the Amazon. At its heart, The Census Taker is a love letter to Latinofuturism, indigenous scientists, and revolutionaries. 
Starting in 2025, the DAG Foundation’s primary mission will be to support individual artists through the DAG Prize. These $20,000 grants are intended to help emerging artists in literature, music, and the visual arts to create work that will bring something new to the artistic landscape.
The DAG Prizes will start accepting applications on February 1, 2025. The deadline to apply is March 15, 2025.
The DAG Foundation launched in 2024 with the intention to support early-career and emerging artists in literature, music, and the visual arts. In our inaugural year, DAG awarded one-time $20,000 grants to nonprofit organizations with strong histories of nurturing innovative artists whose work explores new directions for their art forms. We are proud to support:
One Story. A literary journal that, since 2002, has published one short story each month, and never published the same writer twice. One Story also offers writing classes, conferences, and an annual “Literary Debutante Ball.” One Story authors have won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Emerging Writers Award, and have been included numerous times in the annual Best American Short Stories anthology.
Salt Lick Incubator. An artist development organization supporting aspiring musicians in the early stages of their creative journeys. Founded in 2022, Salt Lick supports musicians by providing funding, collaborative opportunities, workshops, and strategic support from industry professionals to help musicians develop artistically, sustain their well-being, and forge viable careers.
The Wassaic Project. An artist-run community and arts education space that curates exhibitions, produces community events, and hosts artist residencies. Since 2008, the Wassaic Project has served hundreds of working artists and art students by providing time and space to create and exhibit their work, offering lectures, after-school programs, and summer camps, and developing programs that are creative, experimental, and accessible across the economic spectrum.
