2019 Ivan Gold Fellow Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American freelance writer whose nonfiction work focuses on travel & food writing and personal essays. After co-authoring and translating two books on Chinese politics & economics, she is currently working on a novel set in 2000s Shanghai. Her creative work has been published on Medium, Entropy Magazine, World Nomads, Ripple Journal, the Yale Daily News Magazine, the Yale Herald, and the Yale Globalist. She was the recipient of the World Nomads 2016 Food Writing scholarship and the 2018 Salty Quill Writers’ Retreat scholarship. Prior to freelance writing, she worked at a foreign policy think-tank in Washington, D.C. Some of her writing can be found at https://medium.com/@aubereylescure.
2019 WROB Gish Jen Fellow Jéssica Oliveira (she/they) is a Brazilian-born writer, interpreter, and community organizer who immigrated to the Greater Boston area in 1999. Currently, she is working on a collection of interconnected short stories centering the chasm between immigrant parents and their hyphenated American children. Jéssica is a 2018 Emerging Writer Fellow at GrubStreet, a former fifth grade teacher, and a Teach For America alum. In her spare time, she enjoys befriending bartenders, reading tarot, and discussing astrology. Jéssica lives in Everett, MA and can be found on Twitter @jhelen91.
2019 Writers’ Room Fellow Andrew Siañez-De La O is a Chicanx fiction writer and playwright from El Paso, Texas. He is currently a PlayLab Writer with Pipeline Theatre Company (NYC). He graduated from Emerson College with a BFA in Theatre and Performance and was awarded the college’s Betsy Carpenter Playwriting Award for his play Sangre Mía. In 2018 he was a part of the first cohort of playwrights in the National Young Playwright in Residence program with Echo Theatre Company (LA) and a Playwright Fellow with Company One (Boston). His collection of short stories, Lo Siento Miguel, was published by Wilde Press in 2017. His prose has appeared in fiction magazines such as The Grief Diaries, Stork Literary Magazine, and Concrete Literary Magazine. He will be using his time at the Writers Room of Boston to work on his new play Wilder.
2019 Writers’ Room Fellow Amy Yelin’s creative nonfiction , including excerpts from her memoir-in progress A Stranger There, appear in The Gettysburg Review, the Baltimore Review, Salon, and other publications, as well as three anthologies (Welcome to the Neighborhood forthcoming Dec 2019). She’s the recipient of two Pushcart nominations for “The Memoirist” (SweetLit) and “Taboo” (Pithead Chapel), and a Best American Essays notable mention for “Torn” in The Best American Essays 2007. Her awards include a scholarship to the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony, as well as fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Writer’s Room in Boston. Amy has taught creative nonfiction classes at Grub Street and is also a founding member of the Arlington Author Salon as well as assistant nonfiction editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
2019 Finalist Jordan J. Coriza’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Chicago Quarterly Review, the Worcester Review, The Bare Life Review, and elsewhere. Though he calls Boston home, he’s lived in Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. He makes a living as a communications professional for a nonprofit global health organization and is writing a novel set in Argentina during its last military dictatorship. He has an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. Find him on Twitter @JordanCoriza