Every two years, as applications open for the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, we’re honored to hear from wonderfully impressive and engaged emerging writers—who are also teachers, editors, scholars, critics, organizers—from around the country and world. To encounter this breadth and depth of literary work is a source of hope.

We’re delighted to announce that in 2022–2024 we’ll be joined by the prose writer Joseph Earl Thomas, coming to us from Philadelphia, as the new Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing, hosted at Cleveland State. Thomas’s stunningly innovative, inimitable memoir of childhood, Sink, is forthcoming in 2023. He writes across genres, his work omnivorously informed—by the structures and insights of video games, Black Studies, fantasy and sci-fi, digital life, realities of race and economic inequality, the speculative building of new possible worlds—and committed to creating new forms. We’re thrilled to welcome his writing, teaching, editing, and community work to Cleveland.

—Hilary Plum, interim director, CSU Poetry Center

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and studies English in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir Sink won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.

photograph by Drake Masters