The Shay Youngblood Fellowship
Take World Lisbon, in association with the writer and editor Veronica Chambers, is proud to announce the Shay Youngblood Fellowship.
Shay Youngblood was a novelist, playwright, poet and visual artist whose groundbreaking work helped shape the landscape of American literature for women of colour and queer writers from the 1980s into the 2020s. Among her notable works was her debut novel, Black Girl in Paris.
This one-time award will gift a stay at our autumn 2025 retreat in beautiful Colares. The dates of the retreat are October 11-16, The fellowship includes accommodation (shared with one other writer), all breakfast and lunches, two opening and closing restaurant meals and all activities and writing workshops.
Please note that travel expenses to and from the retreat are not included.
Take World prioritises womxn of colour writers and for this scholarship queer womxn of colour writers are strongly encouraged to apply.
The application deadline is August 1st, We will notify the successful applicant by the beginning of September.
To apply for the fellowship, please click here and fill out the Google Form.
Excerpt from Black Girl in Paris, by Shay Youngblood
Paris. September 1986. Early morning. She is lying
on her back in a hard little bed with her eyes closed, dreaming in French. Langston was here. There is a black girl in Paris lying in a bed on the fifth floor of a hotel in the Latin
Quarter. Her eyes are closed against the soft pink dawn. Delicate maps of light line her face, tattoo the palms of her hands, the insides of her thighs, the soles of her feet like lace. Jimmy was here...
James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Milan Kundera all had lived in Paris as if it had been part of their training for greatness. When artists and writers spoke of Paris in their memoirs and letters home it was with reverence. Those who have been and those who still dream mention the quality of the light, the taste of the wine, the joie de vivre, the pleasures of the senses, a kind of freedom to be anonymous and also new. I wanted that kind of life even though I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.