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Fellowship Overview

The Undocupoets Fellowship annually grants three $500 fellowships, with no strings attached, to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States.

In partnership with the Fine Arts Work Center, each Undocupoets Fellowship includes a fully funded opportunity to attend the Summer Workshop Program in Provincetown, MA.

Applications will open in the Fall of 2026

Undocupoets Fellows

Anonymous

The third recipient of the 2024-2025 Undocupoets Fellowship has chosen to remain anonymous

Leticia Priebe Rocha

Leticia Priebe Rocha is a poet, visual artist, and editor. She is the author of the chapbook In Lieu of Heartbreak, This is Like (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and was a contributor in Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial, 2023). Leticia earned her bachelor’s from Tufts University, where she was awarded the 2020 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she immigrated to Miami, FL at the age of 9 and currently resides in the Greater Boston area. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Driftwood Anthology, Salamander, Rattle, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 Undocupoets Fellow and was a recipient of a 2024 Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals. Leticia is also an Editorial Associate for Yellow Arrow Publishing and served as Guest Editor for their EMBLAZON issue. She teaches poetry and collaging workshops.

Aside from living and breathing poetry, Leticia is enthusiastic about collaging, museums, the writing community at MassPoetry, Bojack Horseman, (very) amateur archery, The Sopranos, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, rom-coms (esp anything with Julia Roberts in it), the cowboy emoji, Mitski, and the moon, of course. She is passionate about fostering the arts in her community and is co-chair of the Medford Arts Council.

Charlotte Abotsi

Charlotte Abotsi is a poet raised in Providence, Rhode Island. As a spoken word poet, she has competed in several international poetry slams. Her work has been written about in HuffPost and Mic.com, and her poems can be read in Wax Nine journal. She has received fellowships from the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Tin House, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, AIR Serenbe, and Define American. She co-curated season two of the poetry-based web series Ours Poetica for the Poetry Foundation.

Mico Astrid

Mico Astrid is a Filipino/American multidisciplinary artist whose work explores diasporic identity, lived experience, and memory. As an immigrant who lived undocumented in the U.S. for twenty years, their practice centers the illumination of stark realities under oppressive states and ultimately works toward a greater collective understanding of injustices embedded in current systems. Mico was born in the Philippines, raised throughout California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington: unceded Duwamish land. Their work can be found in the Quarterless Review, Opal Literary Magazine, and at micoastrid.com.

Georgio Russell

Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and an alumnus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as well as the Obsidian Foundation. He is a past winner of the Peepal Tree Press Prize (2019), the Mervyn Morris Prize (2020), the Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), and the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024). He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2022 and 2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and long-listed for the National Poetry Competition (2022) held by the Poetry Society. Russell was also a featured poet for the British Council’s project, Unwritten Poems: Exploring Caribbean Engagement in WWI. His work has been published in Yolk Literary Magazine, PREE magazine, Frontier Poetry, the London Magazine, Lolwe, Cordite, Magma, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Brampton, Ontario, where he teaches English for Educate Academy. Some of his favorite poets include Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Ocean Vuong, Kwame Dawes, and Roger Reeves.

Jesús I. Valles

Jesús I. Valles (2018) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is a 2021 CantoMundo fellowship recipient at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2019 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers’ Poetry Workshop, and a poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week. Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator, and the runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR’s Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets' LatiNext Anthology, the Best New Poets 2020 anthology, and the anthology, Somewhere We Are Human. As an actor, they are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama (2018), and Outstanding Original Script (2018) and they were nominated for the Mark David Cohen New Play Award for their play, (Un)Documents. For their playwriting work, Jesús has received awards and support from OUTSider festival, The Kennedy Center, the Kernodle award, New York Theatre Workshop, and The Flea. Jesús is currently an MFA playwriting student at Brown University.

Frankie Concepcion

Frankie Concepcion (2019) is a writer from the Philippines, founder of the Boston Immigrant Writers Salon, and current MFA candidate at Arizona State University. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was named Sibling Rivalry Press’ 2019 Undocupoet Fellow, and has been part of the editorial teams of GLRSQUASH and Winter Tangerine. Her work has been published in Joyland, HYPHEN, Bodega, and Rappler, amongst others. Find her at frankieconcepcion.com

In the interest of protecting the identity and status of our second 2020 Undocupoets Fellow, we will not announce their name. This is a statement they have written in lieu of a biography: "As a poet of African descent, I understand what it means to belong to two places at once. But I also understand what it means to be deserted by one as a result of the distance created by involuntary migration and displaced by one because of draconian laws. My sense of identity flows through my verse: through it I am coping, overcoming, surviving, and reaching joy. More than anything, poetry is an act of service for self-actualization and freedom."

Aline Mello

Aline Mello (2018) is a Brazilian poet and editor. Her work often centers around themes of identity, religion, the body, and the experience of the self living in diaspora. Her immigrant and undocumented identity have influenced her writing and her art. She is an Undocupoet fellow and an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University. Her debut poetry collection MORE SALT THAN DIAMOND is out now. Her handle for all things social is @thealinemello.

Jan-Henry Gray

Jan-Henry Gray (2017) is the author of Documents (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019), selected by D.A. Powell as the winner A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the chapbook Selected Emails (speCt Books, 2019). Born in the Philippines and raised in California where he worked as a chef, Jan lived undocumented in the U.S. for more than 32 years. A Cooke Foundation Scholar and Kundiman Fellow, he is currently an Assistant Professor and Director of the Creative Writing MFA program at Adelphi University in New York.

laurel c.

laurel c. is a poet, student organizer, and teaching artist from Taiwan. A recipient of fellowships from Pink Door and Kundiman, they are a 2018 Brave New Voices Future Corps Member, a Youth Speaks Emerging Poet Mentor, and a member of the 2018–2019 CalSLAM team. Their poems appear in Black Warrior Review, the Shade Journal, Foglifter, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. Currently an undergraduate student earning a B.A. in Ethnic Studies, they are dedicated to curating spaces for migrant artists of color and organizing with underserved trans and queer students of color on campus. They believe their revolution begins with listening.

Anni Liu

Anni Liu (2017) was born in Xī’ān in the year of the goat. She is the author of Border Vista, which won the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize from Persea Books, and her work is featured in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Ecotone, Two Lines, and elsewhere. She was recently named a Djanikian Scholar by the Adroit Journal. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir about parole, translating the poetry of Dù Yá (度涯), and editing fiction and nonfiction at Graywolf Press.

Oswaldo Vargas

Oswaldo Vargas is a former farmworker, a graduate from the University of California, Davis. Anthology features include: Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. His work can also be seen in The Louisville Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Huizache, The Acentos Review, Raspa Magazine, Glass Poetry Press, West Trade Review, Dovecote Magazine, Midway Journal, Somos en Escrito, Pine Hills Review, Bozalta and the Green Mountains Review tribute issue to former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California.

Wo Chan

Wo Chan, who performs as The Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl or wochan.me.
Photo Credit: Justin J Wee.

Claudia Rojas

Claudia Rojas is a Salvadoran-American creative communications pro based in Falls Church, VA. She believes language can influence social shifts. Her poems are published in poetry magazines throughout the U.S. and in the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. Claudia has a full-length poetry manuscript.
As a Refugee Storytellers Collective member and Undocupoets alumna, Claudia shares her story to advocate for human rights. She has provided press, design, and messaging expertise to nonprofits and small businesses for over 5 years.

Beatriz Yanes Martinez

Beatriz Yanes Martinez is a queer Salvadoran poet and curator raised in Long Island, New York and currently based in Vermont. Their poetry is informed by bodies of water, oral traditions from their grandparents, speculative futurisms, a passion for art, and archives. Her work has been published in Bodega Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Acentos Review, and La Horchata Zine and she has received fellowships from the Brooklyn Poets, and Community of Writers.

Our Team

Our Mission

Undocupoets promotes the work of poets who are currently or formerly undocumented in the United States and raises consciousness about the structural barriers we face in the literary community. We believe in supporting all poets, regardless of immigration status.

Support

Undocupoets is hosted by Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and has been supported by grant from the Amazon Literary Partnership (ALP) and Academy of American Poets Poetry Fund, the Literary Arts Emergency Fund, and through private donations. To donate, please follow the link to contact our fiscal sponsor Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture and indicate your contribution for Undocupoets.

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