We’re so pleased to announce that Aaron Caycedo-Kimura (Poetry ’20) and current fiction MFA Julia Pike have received Emerging Artists Awards this spring! Given by the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston, the grant is one of New England’s most prestigious, and supports musicians and visual artists as well as writers. We’re very proud to have had several St. Botolph award recipients from our program over the years, including Duy Doan (Poetry ’10), Kimberly Elkins (Fiction ’09), Neshat Khan (Fiction ’18), Jillian Jackson (Fiction ’15), Val Otarod (Fiction ’20), Sara Rivera (Poetry ’13), and Grace Yun (Fiction ’18)!
From Aaron’s winning application, a poem entitled “Hand Tilling”:
the smell of earth takes him back to San Gabriel the family
farm of rented acreage before the War before
Executive Order 9066 eviction incarceration
From Julia’s winning application, a story entitled “If I Were a Different Kind of Person”:
Vindicated, Maeve started to run, past the trees at the edge of the sand, bleached bone-white, down to the edge of the water. She trailed her hand through the tip of a wave, then pulled back quickly, yelled “Freezing!” and stuck her fingers in her mouth. She could stay this young because everything had always been simple for her, Austin knew.
Congratulations, Aaron and Julia! We’re excited for you.
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, DMQ Review, Tule Review, Louisiana Literature, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. He is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017).
Since graduating from Amherst College in 2019, Julia Pike has been a yogurt swirler in Brooklyn, New York, an English teacher in Chiang Rai, Thailand, and a nanny in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, The Common, and Rookie Magazine. She lives in Boston, MA.
