Current Cheuse Fellows

Angela Tang (she/her) is a first-year Fiction MFA candidate. She grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Williams College with an Art History degree and a focus in printmaking. She spent most of her twenties working as a youth organizer in Asian American nonprofits in New York and Washington, D.C.

With the Cheuse Fellowship, Angela will be traveling to emerging Chinatowns in Greece and Turkey. While visiting the port city of Thessaloniki, Greece, she will attend theater performances by the Sino-Hellenistic Performing Arts Alliance, which blends Greek tragedy with traditional Chinese opera. While visiting Dolapdere, Turkey, she will interview a Uyghur journalist stringer who covers news on Uyghur communities, a Muslim ethnic minority group from Xinjiang, China. These experiences with Chinese diaspora communities in Greece and Turkey will inform Angela's novel, a coming-of-age/Künstlerroman about an Asian American woman struggling to create art and find meaning in a capitalist society. Unlike the protagonist in Crazy Rich Asians, who ultimately gains acceptance into her partner’s wealthy family, Angela's protagonist breaks up with her partner and finds community with other working-class Asian American creatives in Europe. Through this, she grows more confident in her work and self-identity.

Angelina Morin is a Jewish researcher and lyrical writer who is presently obtaining a MFA in Nonfiction. She has been published in the Colton Review, DCGather, Hatikvah Magazine, and received an honorable mention at the NC College Media Association 2021 Statewide College Media Awards. She currently resides in the DMV where she listens to an absorbent amount of live Jazz, hones her billiards “skills” and dotes on Kit, her oh-so-precious cat!
Her fascination with Jewish resilience, selfless sacrifice, and cultural preservation manifests in her thesis research on Doña Gracia Nasi. Nasi, a Crypto-Jew, lived in a time of great persecution for Jewish people. Still, she risked her life and livelihood to ensure Jewish tradition could persist by sustaining and expanding an underground refugee route aiding Jews fleeing the Inquisition.

Angelina will spend four weeks abroad in Portugal and Italy following Nasi’s route of expulsion to compose a book-length lyrical biography intertwined with personal memoir. She hopes to show the contemporary reader the beauty of rediscovering and embracing one’s identity, and the courage it takes to protect one’s cultural history and future. 

Klara Kalu is an MFA Creative Writing student specializing in Fiction at George Mason University. She writes contemporary stories that enlighten and offer insights into the intricacies of African narratives, focusing on themes of love, loss, and emotional depths of human connection. Her work explores the spaces between tradition and modernity, memory and reinvention, offering fresh perspectives on identity and belonging.

With the Cheuse Fellowship, Klara is traveling to Barbados to explore the echoes of culture and kinship within the island’s communities. Through archival research, oral histories, and on-the-ground immersion, she aims to trace how ancestral ties have endured across generations despite displacement and erasure. Her project seeks to breathe life into forgotten stories, reconnecting threads between the Caribbean and Africa, and reimagining the ways in which history continues to shape contemporary diasporic experiences.

Katey Funderburgh (she/they) is a second-year MFA candidate studying poetry. She completed her BA in English and Peace & Justice Studies at Regis University. She currently serves as a Poetry Alive! fellow, and as a co-coordinator for the Incarcerated Writers Project of phoebe journal.

With the Cheuse Center Fellowship, Katey will be traveling to Scotland to study Eriskay ponies and to conduct interviews with Scottish birth doulas. With these two narratives, she plans to tell parallel stories of community care.