Minnesota State Write Like Us
Minnesota State Write Like Us is an equity-based creative writing program at five Twin Cities metro-area community colleges: Anoka-Ramsey Community College, Century College, Minneapolis College, Normandale Community College, and North Hennepin Community College. Minnesota State Write Like Us centers and celebrates the work of BIPOC writers and writing students, fostering literary mentorship and leadership as it builds a platform for shared stories, voices, and lived experiences.
Write Like Us will host four author-mentors in residence during the 2022-2023 academic year. The residencies will feature local BIPOC author-mentors who will work throughout the year with BIPOC mentees—students at each of our campuses. Write Like Us hopes to increase BIPOC recruitment, retention, and representation in our Associate of Fine Arts and creative writing certificate programs—programs with high rates of persistence, graduation, and transfer.
Minnesota State Equity 2030
The inaugural year of the Minnesota State Write Like Us program was funded by a $150,000 Minnesota State Multi-Campus Collaboration grant in support of Minnesota State’s Equity 2030 goals. Minnesota State is a consortium of thirty state colleges and seven universities in Minnesota. Equity 2030 aims to close the educational equity gaps across race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geographic location by the end of the decade at every Minnesota State college and university.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division. His bestselling memoir Heavy: An American Memoir won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible Audiobook of the Year. Heavy was named a best book of 2018 by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, among other publications and one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. Long Division was honored with the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2014, and was shortlisted for a number of other awards, including The Believer Book Award, the Morning News Tournament of Books, and the Ernest J. Gaines Fiction Award. A contributing editor for Vanity Fair, his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, NPR, Colorlines, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, The Oxford American, Lit Hub, and many others in addition to Gawker. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University.
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018), young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new book, Botched, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023). She lives in Minneapolis with her family.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, will be released by Algonquin in October of 2022.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn and is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Write Like Us author-mentors will visit creative writing classrooms at each of the five participating colleges during fall and spring semesters of 2021-2022 and will work individually with eight scholarship mentees from each of the five campuses (forty total) throughout the academic year. Each mentor will interview one of the nationally prominent authors in the public on-stage events. 
LM (Lisa Marie) Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MNHS Press 2019), their essays and poetry have appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, The Public Art Review, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, The B'K', Quarterly West, Voicemail Poems elsewhere. They attend the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. https://lisamariebrimmer.com/
Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His essay, “On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy,” is included in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.
Nicola Koh is a Malaysian Eurasian 15 years in the American Midwest, a Protestant Seminary trained atheist, and a minor god in Tetris. They are a Twin Cities based freelance editor and teacher, most recently as a Loft Teaching Artist and an instructor at Hamline University. They received their MFA from Hamline and were a fellow for the 2018 VONA/Voices Workshop and the 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series. Their stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in places like Southwest Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Brown Orient, and is forthcoming in Margins. In their free time they undertake a menagerie of projects, take too many pictures of their animals, and craft puns. nicolakoh.com
Taiwana Shambley (she/her) is a freelance fiction writer, editor, teaching artist, & abolitionist from Saint Paul, living in South Minneapolis. She works to imagine and practice liberation for BIPOC youth in Minnesota. Currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Warren Wilson College, Taiwana is a 2021 graduate of Augsburg University in English and African American Studies. She was awarded a 2022 grant from the University of Minnesota’s Center of Urban & Regional Affairs to lead the editing of a collection of stories by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth in Minneapolis. Her fiction has won a 2020 Next Step Fund grant by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and she has prose poems published by the Academy of American Poets and Belt Publishing. She is currently entering year five of a first novel.
For specific information, please visit a participating college website:
Interested in studying creative writing? Learn about the metro area community college programs involved in Minnesota State Write Like Us.