Central to our work at The Freya Project is our belief that words have the power to create change in the world.
Which is why each year, we award unrestricted grants to women and non-binary writers.
Naima Coster reads at a Freya Project event. Photo by Keira Chang
We are so thrilled to support writers Chelsea Bieker, Naima Coster, Aja Gabel, Kyla Marshell & Trish Nelson with our 2020 grants to readers. Each of them will receive grants to support their writing in any way they choose.
Meret Grants, named after the Egyptian goddess of rejoicing, will provide Chelsea, Aja, Kyla & Trish with essential support for their work. This year our Juno Grant is awarded to Naima Coster. An unrestricted $5,000 grant, this award support former readers who are also parents.
Congratulations to this year’s winners! Read more about them and their many accomplishments below.
Naima Coster
JUNO GRANT
“I don’t fully know yet how being a parent will inform my future work... What I find most exhilarating is that I have found a new teacher. In her first year of life, my daughter has already inspired me to reexamine my ideas about myself, about her, our family, and the world. I am ready to learn, and learn in public, transmitting all I pick up and wonder along the way.”
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a novel of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Halsey Street has been recommended as a must-read by People, Essence, BitchMedia, The Root, Well-Read Black Girl, The Skimm, and the Brooklyn Public Library among others. It was a Finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
Naima’s second novel, What’s Mine and Yours, is the story of the integration of a public high school in a small Southern city, and the resulting chain of events that bonds two families together in unexpected and complicated ways over the course of their lives. It is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing.
Naima’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Rumpus, Aster(ix), Kweli, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She has taught writing to students in jail, youth programs, and universities. She currently teaches in the MFA programs at City College in Harlem and Antioch University in L.A., as well as Catapult.
Chelsea Bieker
MERET GRANT
“I believe art immerses a reader into a situation with a character, and through that situation, lessons become evident that hold larger apt truths. I believe this can unite us and create compassion where perhaps it would be difficult to cultivate. It can create conversations and community. This is activism.”
Chelsea Bieker is the author of the novel GODSHOT and the forthcoming story collection, COWBOYS AND ANGELS (2022). Her writing has been published by The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children where she teaches writing.
Learn More: chelseabieker.com // @chelseabieker
Aja Gabel
MERET GRANT
“Writing can inspire and embolden activism by drawing the line from truth our humanity. My hope with each new thing I write is that it’s truest thing I’ve written to date, by which I mean, it strives to be honest about the ways we can live tenderly in an indifferent world.”
Aja Gabel's debut novel, The Ensemble, is out now from Riverhead Books.
Her prose can be found in the The Cut, Buzzfeed, Kenyon Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.
Aja has been the recipient of awards from Inprint, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Kyla Marshell
MERET GRANT
“In times of great political fear, malaise, or despair, it’s easy to find oneself in a state of generalized anxiety, but to not be able to pinpoint its source. Writers are those who, at our best, have the ability to not only connect the dots of what something is, but to communicate it in a way that, just in its clarity, can provide its own kind of solace.”
Kyla Marshell is a creative writer whose poems, essays, articles and interviews have appeared in The Guardian, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Kinfolk, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Poetry Foundation, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere. She has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony, the Jacob K. Javits program, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. In 2013, Ebony.com named her one of "7 Young Black Writers You Should Know."
She is currently at work on a memoir about distance, time, history, and memory in many generations of a Black American family.
Kyla is a graduate of Spelman College with a B.A. in English, and Sarah Lawrence College with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Originally from Boston, she grew up in Silver Spring, MD, Morehead, KY, and Portland, ME, and now lives in New York.
Trish Nelson
MERET GRANT
“The smallest ripples of change happen when people have accessibility to connective experiences... and that is when writing veers into true activism.”
Trish Nelson is a producer, talent booker, writer, performer and activist. She has been a pioneering voice throughout the #MeToo movement shining a spotlight on the experiences of women and the working class and is dedicated to creating work that lifts women and amplifies marginalized voices.
Outside of helping to produce and book numerous large-scale live shows and national tours, she's the creator and host of the storytelling salon The Secret Society of The Sisterhood that takes place in Los Angeles and NYC.