AUSTIN, Tex., April 17, 2025 – Torch Literary Arts is proud to announce the 2025 Torch Retreat Fellows! Eight writers with works-in-progress across poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and script (plays, screenplays) were selected among 375 applicants to participate in our annual retreat at the Colton House Hotel from July 20-27.

Each fellow will receive a $1,000 stipend to help with costs associated with travel, supplies, or other financial needs to support their attendance at the retreat. Intentional about our vision of creating community, each fellow is paired with another writer in their genre, participates in craft talks and a public reading, and is encouraged to rest. 

Introducing the 2025 Torch Retreat Fellows

Jumi Bello is a fiction writer, scholar, and advocate committed to exploring abolitionist futures and disability justice. A PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, her work examines critical disability studies, carceral studies, speculative fiction, and decolonial worldbuilding. She is also a fiction graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a proud Posse Scholar alum. Jumi’s creative work includes HO(US)E, a speculative novel that imagines a sentient halfway house bearing witness to the afterlives of psychiatric survivorship. Her concept of Mad Futurism serves as a framework for imagining care beyond the constraints of carceral systems. Her writing has been supported by the Black Mountain Institute, Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and Roots. Wounds. Words. Through her work as a writer, mentor, and literary community member, Jumi is dedicated to fostering conversations on disability justice and speculative worldbuilding. Her recent presentations at the Eaton Conference on Speculative Fiction and the Communities of Care Symposium explore the intersections of narrative, memory, and liberation. At The Torch Retreat, she looks forward to continuing her exploration of storytelling as a catalyst for transformative change.

Jassmine Parks is a Detroit poet, professor, arts administrator, and flower child. Currently working on her poetic debut, touch stone, Jassmine’s work examines the resiliency of the Black and feminine experience. As an adoptee, Jassmine delves into the thematic depths of the long-term impact of mass incarceration and family separation, daughter and motherhood, identifying the traumatic ruptures and healing salve within her lineage and reclaiming narrative as a tool to own her power. Jassmine’s poetry has been supported and published with Obsidian: Literature & Arts In The African Diaspora, Clearline Magazine, and Room Object, and her performances can be found on PBS, Button Poetry, SlamFind, and All Def Poetry. She has been nurtured through fellowships from The Watering Hole, Pen America: Emerging Voices, Michigan Traditional Arts Program, Kresge Arts In Detroit, and Room Project. You can find her basking in the light of her husband and two children or lost in nostalgia, wishing for the time of aluminum foil grills and Cash Money Records was taking over for the nine nine and the two thousand. As a flower child, she wishes to leave a legacy of thriving, tenderness and growth. Learn more about Jassmine at her website: www.jassmineparkstheflowerchild.com.

.CHISARAOKWU. (she/her) is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet artist. Drawing inspiration from her Igbo heritage, quantum physics, her career in medicine, indigenous healing practices, and the natural world, her poetry weaves archival text, visual art, film, and collage to unsilence the archives pertaining to Africans in the diaspora. Her work appears in literary and academic journals and received fellowship support from Cave Canem, Anaphora Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and more. She was the 2023 Sonia Sanchez Poetry Fellow at MacDowell and in 2025 received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an alum of Duke University School of Medicine and Stanford University. 

Otito Obi (They/We/ She) is a queer, Black, Igbo, neuroexpansive writer. Their work explores mental health, ecology, and intimacy. They love writing genre-bending stories that are character-driven and woven with magical realism. Otito was awarded a 2024 Rooted and Written Fellowship for their sci-fi pilot Bloodsap. They were a finalist for the 2025 Sundance Collab Cultural Impact Residency and the 2025 Periplus Fellowship. They also won a 2023 Sundress Academy for the Arts Residency for their dramedy pilot Pinky Swear. Their dramedy pilot, Knead, received an honorable mention in the 2023 Finish Line Script Competition and was a semifinalist in the 2022 Nashville Film Festival Screenwriting Competition. In addition to writing films and tv shows, Otito is a member of the 2025 Liberation Ecology Cohort with Critical Ecology Lab. Otito is also the producer and host of Best Friends for (N)Ever, a podcast about the highs and lows of friendship. When we’re not conjuring and devouring stories, we’re practicing yoga, walking through forests, swimming through water, and pressing flowers in books we haven’t finished reading yet.

Kenndall Wallace loves to write. As a Black playwright, author, and screenwriter, Kenndall uses the written word to not only entertain audiences-- but create living, moving art pieces through storytelling. She was an inaugural winner of the Farmers' Alley Theatre Lumen Playwriting Competition, a Broadcast Education Association winner for her debut feature-length screenplay, and has been honored three times by the Region III Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, being awarded at the national level in 2024 with her full-length play 'To Cry Into Sand'. As she grows as a writer and artist, she hopes to continue writing stories that explore and honor Black culture. 

Kennetha Bigham-Tsai is a writer, teacher, preacher, and social activist. Her primary literary form has been the sermon. She has preached in pulpits throughout the United States and beyond and has taught or presented in multiple venues, including Boston University, as the Anna Howard Shaw lecturer, as a presenter at the World Methodist Council, in Gothenburg Sweden, and most recently as the opening preacher for the Lake Junaluska Peace Conference in North Carolina. She has served in The United Methodist Church for more than twenty years and was elected bishop in 2022. At this stage in her life and career, she is exploring other literary forms, including poetry and memoir.  She is the recipient of poetry and fiction awards from the Friends of the Chautauqua Institute and a regular participant in the Iowa Writers Summer Festival. Her current project is a memoir about trauma. She notes, “I want to write the stories about how I got through. They are my truth, the plumb line of my life, from fists that wounded to the hands that heal. I am really writing the story of my hands, which I have spent a career offering to others in ministry.”  

Starr Davis is a talented writer and devoted mother whose work appears in The Kenyon Review and Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets. She has received fellowships from The Luminary and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and serves as the Creative Nonfiction Editor of TriQuarterly. A 2025 Visions After Violence Fellow with the After Violence Project, Starr is dedicated to exploring the intersections of trauma, justice, and storytelling. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and a BA in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University of Akron. Her personal-political reporting has been recognized by Longreads and featured on podcasts like What You Didn’t Expect in Fertility. A survivor, Starr advocates for women writers and marginalized voices, often speaking on domestic violence and economic injustice against Black mothers. Nominated for awards such as the Pushcart Prize, she is also a 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow with Haymarket Books. Her poetry collection, AFFIDAVIT, will be published by Hanging Loose Press in Fall 2025. She resides in Houston, empowering women through volunteer work.

Idza Luhumyo was born in Mombasa, Kenya. She studied law at the University of Nairobi, earned an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS--University of London, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University.  Her writing has appeared in various publications, including in Transition Magazine, African Arguments, the Masters Review, and the Porter House Review. Her short story, "Five Years Next Sunday," earned her the 2021 Short Story Day Africa Prize and the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing. Other awards include the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award and the Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship. She currently lives in Austin and teaches in the English department at Texas State University.

The inaugural Torch Retreat convened in 2023 with six fellows writing across poetry, fiction, and script and included retreat fellows Ashley M. Coleman, Ajanaė Dawkins, Victoria Newton Ford, Ashunda Norris, Obinwanne Nwizu, and Keya Vance. Our 2024 fellows included Sandra Jackson-Opoku, m. mick powell, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton, DW McKinney, Elizabeth Brown, Meredith L. King, and Destiny Hemphill. You can watch a video of the 2023 Torch Retreat readings and 2024 Torch Retreat readings on our YouTube Channel at www.youtube.com/@torchlitarts. 

###

About Torch Literary Arts

Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established with love and intention in 2006 to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Torch has featured work by Toi Derricotte, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, workshops, an annual retreat, and special events. 

Help Torch continue to publish and promote Black women writers by donating today.

Media Contact Information:

Brittany Heckard

Communications Associate

bheckard@torchliteraryarts.org 

(512) 641-9251