Prose Residency 2024
introducing the writers of the 2024 workshop with Jamie Figueroa
Beto Caradepiedra
Beto Caradepiedra (he/him) is the son of Panamanian immigrants, an inheritance he explores in his fiction. His stories have been featured or are forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Pleiades, Callaloo, Northwest Review, Huizache, and other journals. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and resides in New York City where he was born and raised. He is a recipient of a Fine Arts Work Center Scholars Award and a proud Macondista. Beto is currently at work on a collection of short stories. In a previous life, he was the owner of an insurance agency for many years and a martial arts instructor. He enjoys cooking Caribbean foods and is addicted to Van Leeuwen ice cream, CrossFit, and nature walks in the Staten Island Greenbelt with his wife and two children.
Caritza Berlioz
Caritza Berlioz (she/her) is first-generation Honduran New Yorker and currently based in Queens. She is a graduate of the City College of New York (CUNY) Creative Writing MFA program, a mentor at People of Color in Publishing, and an acquiring editor in the publishing industry. Her writing explores themes of intergenerational family dynamics, immigration, and class. She is an alumni of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and is currently writing a novel. When she is not reading or writing, you can find her catching a movie at Film Forum, eating ramen, or biking around her neighborhood.
Alexandra Clemente Perez
Alexandra Clemente Perez (she/her) writes through her lens as an immigrant and researcher. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she moved to the US for college and now holds a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco. She has been published in The New York Times, Sport Literate, The Acentos Review, and Encephalon. She is writing an essay collection focusing on her experience living through and leaving Venezuela. Her work has been supported by organizations like Tin House. She lives in the Bay Area, where she’s always cold. She is bad at karaoke, but that doesn’t stop her.
Ilza J. Garcia
Ilza J. García (she/her) is a Chicana mother, writer, artist, and educator who writes about intergenerational healing & wisdom, family, identity, and borderland communities within shifting landscapes. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Texas State University and serves as an editor for Mouthfeel Press and Clash!, where she elevates writers exploring borderlands in their work. Ilza has 20 years of experience in education, creating writing communities for people of all ages and helping people find connections between English, Spanish, and their interwoven cultures. She loves to explore swimming holes and cenotes, dream up new stories, and laugh with her son.
Angela Chan-Meinero
Angela Chan-Meinero (she/her) is a Chinese American writer working on a memoir about immigrant family dynamics and intergenerational trauma. Her terminally ill father asked her to write a story about his life, leading her to reckon with her identities as daughter, immigrant, and citizen in a polarized America.
Ms. Chan-Meinero is excited to attend VONA’s Prose Residency. She is also a Tin House alumna, a finalist for the Kenyon Review 2024 Developmental Editing Fellowship, and the recipient of the Hudson Valley Writing Center 2022 Altman Writers of Color Scholarship. Prior to writing full time, Ms. Chan-Meinero was an award-winning web content producer and an adjunct professor teaching web design and animated storytelling. Her work has been published in Saranac Review and Syracuse Review. She graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and received her Masters at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Ms. Chan-Meinero enjoys photography, traveling, foraging, and running. When not planting flowers on her Pikman app, she can be found in the kitchen, recreating childhood favorites including mooncakes, Chinese buns, and red bean soup. She lives in Rockland County, NY, with her husband and loves spending time with their adult children.
Matthew Bucknor
Matthew Bucknor (he/him, @mbucknor) received his MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. His fiction has appeared in Intima and Aaduna and has received recognition from Glimmer Train and The Sewanee Review. In 2023, he received a Contributor Award to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was named a Rooted & Written fellow by the SF Writers Grotto. In 2024, he was selected to participate in the Tin House Summer Workshop. He is also a physician at the University of California, San Francisco and an Executive Committee member of the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford, where he completed his medical degree, and serves on the advisory board of the Bellevue Literary Press.
Edward Iwata
Edward Iwata is an award-winning news, business, and investigative reporter making the challenging leap into literary writing. Ed’s creative nonfiction has appeared in National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, and the old San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle.
“Race Without Face,” a personal essay on cultural identity, was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 1992 and was reprinted in many anthologies. At the Community of Writers 2023 conference in Lake Tahoe, California, Ed received the James D. Houston memorial scholarship.
Throughout his career, Ed has advocated for diverse storytelling by journalists of color and other marginalized groups. He has written thousands of news stories, but he is proudest of tales on his family history during World War II at the Manzanar concentration camp, and on his journey to Japan with his late parents to see the family’s rice farms and ancestral graves.
Ed was cofounder of the Asian American Journalists Association’s San Francisco chapter, and he headed diversity programs for the historic UNITY convention in Atlanta of minority journalism groups. At Stanford University, Ed was co-director of Okada House, a residence hall and community center that offers programs on Asian American topics.
When Ed isn’t cooking, hiking, or enjoying music, he can be found wandering in the woods, muttering to himself and channeling Basho and Thoreau.
Gionni Ponce
Gionni Ponce is a prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She is a proud alumna of Macondo, Tin House, and soon-to-be, VONA. She has been awarded fellowships/scholarships to the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center. In 2018, she was named a Writer in South Asia Fellow by Indiana University. In 2024, she was selected as a Poesiæuropa Fellow to travel to Italy to present on Octavia Butler’s influence on women of color writing sci-fi.
While teaching at Indiana University, she was awarded the Earle J. S. Ho Award for Teaching Creative Writing and the Culbertson First Year Teaching Award. She’s organized workshops for young writers, assistant directed national writing workshops, and continues to host readings, workshops, and collaborative projects as an arts administrator. Wherever she goes, she aims to create storytelling space for traditionally marginalized stories as a writer, artist, cultural curator, and creative writing instructor.
Gionni also keeps an eye towards visual art and is always trying her hand at something new: book binding, zines, resin casting, photography, pottery. This year, she’s creating a film-poem with two other artists as a 2024 Patchwork Fellow. Her work is published in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Kenyon Review Online, and South Carolina Review. She is currently working on a short story collection centered on bilingualism and multi-generational conflict in Mexican-American families.
Also in the residency cohort:
Isaura Lira Greene
Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee