We’re excited to announce the 2023 Full Stop Editorial Fellows: Michelle Chan Schmidt and Natália Affonso!
These fellowships invite early-career writers or editors to independently envision, commission, and edit an issue of the Full Stop Quarterly. Each fellow receives a budget to commission nonfiction essays and art, as well as guidance from the Full Stop editorial collective. The resulting quarterly issues will be released in Summer/Fall 2024.
Keep reading below to meet the fellows and learn about their editorial projects. And subscribe to our Patreon to receive these forthcoming issues of the Full Stop Quarterly and help support this Fellowship for future years.
Michelle Chan Schmidt
This special issue of the Full Stop Quarterly will map the margino-centric literatures and criticism of “postcolonial cities in dis(-)appearance.” “Dis(-)appearance” confers simultaneous abjection (“disappearance”) and misrecognition (“dis-appearance”) on the postcolonial metropolis, sculpted and eroded by empire. This project reflects contemporary modes of post-colonial dis(-)appearance, intersecting with imperialism: warfare, authoritarian policy, or environmental reaction to human exploitation, physically destroying the city’s tangible reality or driving its inhabitants elsewhere.
Is there such a thing as Theseus’s city? Does it live in its people or in a place? I’d love for this issue to become an atlas for as many dis(-)appearing, postcolonial, non-Western-Eurocentric and non-Americentric cities as possible, by documenting their art in the architectures of as many (indigenous) languages as possible. How does literary (and artistic) creation respond to urban dis(-)appearance? Can the literature of non-imperial languages, or translation, deflect dis(-)appearance? I want to draw attention to the violent and symbolic dis(-)appearances across our planet concurrent with our time. How can literary texts pre-write ruin and re-write the dis(-)appeared city out of real rubble? What unrealized cultural and theoretical potentials hide in the “(-)”?
This issue will seek out formal experimentality and stylistic creativity in re-imagining the ideal City: a framework of human living in constant evolution and entropy; a vehicle for continued human connection, despite dis(-)appearance.
If you have interest in contributing to this special issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, contact Michelle at [email protected].
Michelle Chan Schmidt is a diasporic writer and editor from Hong Kong, now living in Dublin, Ireland. She loves cultural studies and Walter Benjamin. She edits fiction for Asymptote and has been published or has upcoming writing in La Piccioletta Barca, Asymptote, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and the Oxonian Review. You can read some here.
Natália Affonso
What is the power of multilingualism? How can we push back against imperialist/colonial hierarchies (of tongues)? What can multiple languages make possible in light of queerness/cuierness/sexual dissidence?
What have the languages we’ve learned, and the books from diverse geographies we’ve read/translated taught us?
In my special issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, “Tender Tongues,” I am interested in these crossroads, with a focus on people from the so-called Global South, many of whom are im/migrants, to explore how the intersection of language, queerness and shifting dynamics of racialization and belonging can help generate language to define oneself and to approach literary and arts criticism without centering Global North, white, male, cis-hetero standpoints.
I would like us to work from a very broad concept of languages: literature, music, visual art, embodied, language acquisition, learning/shaping/creating language(s) to speak and write about oneself, about minoritized and mis/underrepresented communities, and about literary and artistic works.
If you have interest in contributing to this special issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, contact Natália at [email protected].
Natália Affonso (she/they) is a translator, editor, publishing professional, researcher, teacher, and activist who sometimes commits (to) poems. She’s from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and currently lives in Southern California. She holds an MA in Literatures of the English language (UERJ) and is specially interested in Caribbean, Latin American and other African, Afro diasporic and Indigenous sexual-dissident literatures. Her poetry translations of tatiana nascimento’s work appeared in the anthology Cuíer (Two Lines Press, 2021) and in the chapbook lunduzinho (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). Bookbinding is one of her favorite creative outlets.
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