Top row, left to right: Heidi Bell, TR Brady, Min Li Chan; bottom row, left to right: Rob Franklin, Iris A. Law, Kosiso Ugwueze

It is with enormous pleasure that we announce the finalists for the ninth annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers: Heidi Bell, TR Brady, Min Li Chan, Rob Franklin, Iris A. Law, and Kosiso Ugwueze.

Heidi Bell’s short prose has appeared in New England Review, the Chicago Reader, the Good Men Project, and Southeast Review, among other venues. She has twice received the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship award in prose. She works as a freelance editor in Aurora, Illinois.

TR Brady received their MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Their work has appeared in Poetry Daily, New England Review, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, and Copper Nickel. TR is the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor and lives in Moscow, Idaho.

Min Li Chan is a Malaysian essayist and technologist based in Oakland, CA. Her essays have appeared in New England Review, The Yale Review, The Point Magazine, and BuzzFeed, among other places. She is one of five finalists for Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship. Min Li holds a BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from Northwestern University.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Rob Franklin is a writer of both fiction and poetry. In his work, Franklin often revisits southern landscapes, exploring fissures of identity: race, class, and the betrayals that can occur in intimate relationships across those lines. He holds a BA in Political Science and Creative Writing from Stanford University and an MFA in Fiction from New York University. He lives in New York.

Iris A. Law’s work has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, the Margins, and Waxwing; has been honored by Best of the Net; and was included in the landmark anthology They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. A Kundiman fellow and three-time Pushcart nominee, Iris serves as managing editor for The Adroit Journal and cofounded Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry, which she edited from 2009–2022. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.

Kosiso Ugwueze was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and raised in Southern California. She is a graduate of the MFA program in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University where she was the managing editor of The Hopkins Review as well as a recipient of the Benjamin J. Sankey Prize in Fiction. Kosiso’s short fiction has recently appeared in Joyland, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and New England Review, among others. In 2020, she was awarded a Barbara Deming Memorial grant for feminist fiction. Kosiso is an adjunct lecturer in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

The New England Review Award for Emerging Writers provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August 2023 and is given annually to an emerging writer who offers an unusual and compelling new voice and who has been published by NER in the past year. The winner will be announced in March.

Congratulations to all six finalists!
We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2022.