Announcing the 2026 Get the Word Out Fiction Fellows

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New York, NY—September 15, 2026—Poets & Writers has selected ten writers to take part in the 2026 fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career authors.

Selected through a competitive application process, these ten writers each have a first or second book slated for publication in the coming year. Over the next few months, they will receive expert guidance and peer support through a series of online seminars mentored by May-Zhee Lim, a writer and freelance publicist who has worked with prize-winning authors Hernan Diaz, James McBride, Sigrid Nunez, and others. Throughout the twelve-week program, participants will develop personalized strategies to identify and harness opportunities surrounding the publication of their books. Additional sessions with leading literary professionals will equip them with practical tools and professional connections to carry forward.

“Publishing a first or second book is a huge career milestone, one that many writers work toward for years. Yet when the moment arrives, many find themselves unprepared for what comes next,” said Jamie Asaye FitzGerald, director of programs and partnerships at Poets & Writers. “Get the Word Out helps authors make the most of this pivotal moment and sets them up for future success by connecting them with a network of professionals and fellow writers at similar stages in their careers.”

Launched in 2022, Get the Word Out builds on Poets & Writers’ decades-long history of providing practical guidance about the business of writing. The program aims to reduce barriers to success for writers from historically marginalized communities—including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers—as well as those from outside New York City and those whose books are published by independent presses. The writers who have taken part in the program’s first four years have earned recognition such as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honor and a Lambda Literary Award, and have secured spots on podcasts and anticipated books lists. For more information, visit at.pw.org/GTWO.

Get the Word Out fellows take part at no cost to themselves or their publishers. Through a partnership with Vermont Studio Center (VSC), each year an alum of the program receives a fully funded residency at VSC. Poets & Writers will accept applications for the next cohort of early-career poets beginning in January 2027.

2026 FICTION FELLOWS

Itoro Bassey is a Nigerian American author and journalist whose work explores the tension between societal expectation and selfhood, particularly in the lives of African women and daughters. Her writing moves across questions of family, class, migration, race, and belonging, asking what becomes possible when women begin defining their lives for themselves. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Callaloo, Brittle Paper, Prairie Schooner, Hippocampus, and elsewhere, and her forthcoming story collection, Ajébutter Women, won the 2024 W.S. Porter Prize and will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2027, with an African edition from Paperworth Books. Bassey has received fellowships and residencies that include the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. A former BBC producer, she has reported and produced work spanning global affairs and U.S. politics.

Doris W. Cheng is a Taiwanese American writer and editor. Her debut novel, Keep Your Enemies Close, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in August 2027. She is the author of a fiction chapbook, Earthling, and her stories, essays, and interviews appear in Boston Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Review of Books, Witness, and other literary magazines. She was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshops, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds an MA in English Literature from Columbia University and is fiction editor for Bellevue Literary Review. 

Manola Gonzalez Rosillo is a Mexican Spanish American writer originally from San Diego, California. She is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellowship Finalist and Columbia MFA grad, where she received the Fondation Femme Debut Scholarship and the Writing Program scholarship. She has been published by the Bare Life Review, Columbia Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, and Longreads. Her debut novel, Gringas, which follows a wealthy Mexican matriarch whose secret decision forces her family to flee to the United States, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2028.  

Sakinah Hofler’s work has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and elsewhere. She has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Hurston/Wright Foundation Award for College Writers in Fiction, the Yemassee Poetry Prize, the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. Hofler received a 2026 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Hofler resides in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey, with her family and teaches at Princeton University. Her novel, Stable, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2027.

Shelby Kinney-Lang is a fiction writer from Laramie, Wyoming. He earned a master’s from the University of Oxford and an MFA from the University of California in Irvine. His stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Chicago Quarterly Review, Witness, Santa Monica Review, Joyland, and elsewhere, and he is a recipient of the 2023 O. Henry Prize, selected by Lauren Groff. His debut story collection, SNAKE & SUBMARINE, is forthcoming fall 2027. He lives in western Massachusetts. 

Abby Manzella, a Pushcart Prize winner, is the author of the short story collection, Ripples into the Wild, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in February 2027. Her academic book, Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements (Ohio State University Press, 2017), won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. Originally from Pennsylvania, she now lives in Missouri where she teaches at Truman State University. Previously an artist-in-residence at PlySpace in Indiana, a resident fellow at Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research, and a scholarship recipient to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Manzella’s stories, essays, interviews, and reviews have been published by places such as Threepenny Review, Pleiades, Literary Hub, and the Boston Globe.  

Daniel J. O’Malley’s debut collection, The Younger and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Hub City Press in 2027. His fiction has appeared, in print or online, in the Atlantic, McSweeney’s, the Kenyon Review, Granta, and The Best American Short Stories 2016, among other publications. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.

Andrea Ruggirello’s debut novel, The Memory Token, is forthcoming from Harper Horizon in 2027. She was a 2024 New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow in prose, holds an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University, and is an alumnus of the Tin House Workshop. Her writing appears in Joyland, Redivider, Third Coast, the Baltimore Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, the anthology Body Language, and elsewhere. Born in Korea and raised in New York City, Andrea lives in the Washington, D.C.–Maryland suburbs with her husband and dog.  

Jared Silvia is a writer, musician, and event organizer in Orlando, Florida. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Sierra Nevada Review, decomP, Monkeybicycle, Rabble Lit, and elsewhere. He received the 2017 Brian Turner Literary Arts Prize in Fiction from Sierra Nevada College, and was a recipient of a Luso American Scholarship from the Disquiet International Literary Conference in 2013. He runs Circuit Church, an independent electronic music label. His debut short story collection, Ways This Could Go, is forthcoming from Burrow Press in 2027.

Rose Whitmore is the recipient of the 2021 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from the Southern Review, and the William Peden Prize from the Missouri Review. She has received fellowships from Hemingway’s House in Ketchum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, the San Leandro Arts Commission, and the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford University where she was a Jones Lecturer. Her work has recently appeared in Story Magazine, the Sun, and the Missouri Review. Her debut novel, Exiled, will be published by Dzanc Books in 2027. 

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