We’re excited to announce the 2024 Full Stop Editorial Fellows: Keely Shinners and Annalise Peters!
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 2025.
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.
Keely Shinners
The “Contradictions of Looking” issue brings together essays, reviews, and interviews at the intersection of art and literature: essays on the history of the book object, treatises on art criticism as a literary form, reviews of photo books, interviews with poets-cum-painters and painters-cum-poets. As a novelist who moonlights as an art critic, I am deeply interested in these practices of writing, practices that shore up against practices of looking—and all the contradictions that arise from it.
The world of contemporary art is, indeed, contradictory. Is there any other industry where billionaires rub shoulders with radicals over complimentary glasses of wine? Where the friction between aesthetics, ethics, and economy is so decidedly combustible? Where a single image can be looked at one way as representative of all the world’s beauty—and then, from another angle, representative of all the world’s bloodshed?
In times like ours, times of fracture, depravity, and upheaval—times which are really not that different than any other time on earth, except for the speed and scale at which violence is exercised—what is the value of art? Why should we write about it? How do we sit within all the contradictions of looking?
If you have interest in contributing to this special issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, contact Keely at [email protected].
Keely Shinners is a writer, editor, and performer based in Cape Town. They are the author of the novel How To Build a Home for the End of the World (2022) and the chapbook The Agonies and Ecstasies of Saint Marguerite (2025). Previously, they served as the Editor of ArtThrob, a publication of contemporary art in South Africa, and the Chairperson of the Association for Visual Arts, a non-profit arts organization in Cape Town.
Annalise Peters
This special issue of Full Stop Quarterly will aim to hold folklore as a prism through which to view connection, the self, and the future. Recognizing the inherent fluidity and orality of folk arts, I’d like this issue to loosen definitions of the term, from a non-eurocentric standpoint. It will explore folklore in and as literature, as process, and as performance.
Though often aesthetically and intellectually rooted in the past, cultural lore has a lasting appeal in contemporary literature and media. I’m interested in expanding this realm of exploration to the futurity of folk tales. What are the ways in which folklore helps us to conceive of and imagine the future? Many cultures with deep oral traditions can be said to experience time non-linearly. How then does their folklore diverge from Western notions of temporality?
Other themes will include the cultural stewardship of folklore—how it helps us reflect upon community, heritage, our sense of self. Much access to folklore necessitates translation, introducing both complexities and possibilities, such as the creation of so-called global folklore, and the impact this access has on cultural canons. Another line of exploration will be the ways in which folklore interacts with other media. How does this intermediality impact its meanings and significance?
If you have interest in contributing to this special issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, contact Annalise at [email protected].
Annalise Peters (she/they) is a writer and literary translator, who is particularly interested in creoles and other diaspora languages. She enjoys creative works that deal in afro-descendant imaginations, and that honor ancient ways of storytelling. Annalise is a child of the Caribbean, based in the UK, where they are currently a postgraduate student at the University of Bristol, and translator-in-residence at the National Centre for Writing.
This post may contain affiliate links.
