Announcing the 2025 Ink & Impact Fellows
Announcing our 2025 Inaugural Ink & Impact Fellows! Created in partnership between Lavender Education and Page & Parlor, the Ink & Impact Fellowship is a nine-month program designed to support emerging writers who explore gender, sexuality, and marginalized identities through their work. Fellows receive mentorship, resources, and funding to deepen their craft and develop stories that inspire change. The program culminates in a public reading at Stores in Bloom, the annual event that celebrates writers and raises funds for the fellowship.
Congratulations to Stephanie Dinsae and Billy Zeng, the Inaugural Ink & Impact Fellows for 2025.
A poet and Black Classicist from the Bronx, New York, Stephanie Dinsae is a 2019 Smith College graduate and has received an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation. She often writes poetry about myth as it relates to Blackness and her own life, video games, friendship, and the fallibility/flexibility of memory. Currently, she is published in The Common, hex, Cartridge Lit, Exposed Brick Literary Mag, Dipity Literary Magazine, Burrow Press Review, BRINK, ANMLY, and The Seventh Wave. Her favorite things to do are dance around to music and obsess over astrology. In case you were wondering, Stephanie has major Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius placements.
Billy Zeng (he/him) recently graduated from Tufts University with a Bachelor of Arts in RCD (Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora) Studies with
History and Asian American Studies minors. He is a queer youth worker in Dorchester and aspires to apply trauma-informed and healing justice frameworks to the grassroots anti-displacement organizing work that he is a part of. During his undergraduate years, Billy has been working on a local public history project that centers the community-building and organizing histories of the queer Asian American community in Boston during the 1980s until the early 2000s. Outside of his community organizing and scholarship work, Billy loves collecting Popmart blind boxes, going to concerts, cooking new recipes, creative writing, and learning amateur photography.
We also selected seven finalists in recognition of their outstanding work.
AC (Alyssa Cabrera) is a queer writer and a middle school dual-language teacher. Their direct and intimate work, informed by their Tex-Mex upbringing and Indigenous poetics, explores relational themes of love, intimacy, memory, and cultural healing. This past summer, they studied with Santee Frazier of Cherokee Nation at the Fine Arts Work Center. Off the page, AC can be found dancing, biking, or singing to their dog, Athena.
Fin Leary (they/he) is a trans and autistic author, a program manager at We Need Diverse Books, and a faculty member at GrubStreet and Emerson College. Fin is the editor of the science fiction anthology Future States of Stars (OwlCrate Press, 2026), and a contributor to the young adult horror anthology These Bodies Ain’t Broken edited by Madeline Dyer (Page Street Publishing, 2025). They were a 2024 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices Fellow for Young Adult Fiction. Fin lives with their orange literary cat and a rainbow bookshelf outside of Boston, Massachusetts.
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese American diaspora writer whose work revolves around themes of dreaming, fantasizing, and futurizing, and focuses on topics of diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories. Kyla-Yến's work has appeared in The Offing, Beyond Queer Words, Vănguard, and more. They are the Managing Editor at Rawhead, a Member of the Reader Board at Sundress Publications, and a Fiction Reader for Okay Donkey. They have been awarded residencies, workshops, and/or fellowships from Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Seventh Wave, Abode Press, and more. You can visit Kyla-Yến's author page at www.kylayenhuynhgiffin.com, and find them on Instagram @yenshrine.
Leticia Priebe Rocha is the author of In Lieu of Heartbreak, This is Like (Bottlecap Press, 2024). She earned her bachelor’s from Tufts University, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. Born in São Paulo, she immigrated to Miami, FL at the age of nine and currently resides in Greater Boston. Her work appears in Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, Salamander, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 Undocupoets Fellow and her work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center, Mass Cultural Council, and Cambridge Arts. Leticia is an editor for Yellow Arrow Publishing, teaches various poetry workshops, and loves the moon. For more information, visit her website: leticiaprieberocha.com.
Lily E. Rood (she/her/hers) is a national leader in movements for trans life and leadership. As Executive President at the National Transgender Leadership Council (NTLC), as a student of trans histories, and as a writer and poet, she works across disciplines to uplift trans stories of thriving and connection. In 2023, she became the first openly trans woman elected to a class presidency in the recorded history of Mount Holyoke College. She founded the NTLC in 2024. Outside of work, she loves sharing meals with chosen family and making art with people she loves.
Mallory Gothelf is a graduate of Northeastern University with a degree in psychology, and an unabashed advocate who has spoken and written extensively about mental health and LGBTQIA+ issues for companies and organizations including: This Is My Brave, Aditum Bio, Zencare.co, The Ruderman Foundation, Active Minds, and Minding Your Mind. She has given over 500 presentations across the country. Utilizing her story and knowledge, she launched a mission driven mental health company, Find Your/self. Her passion for queer stories and mental health inspires her current writing.
Theo (he/they) is an ‘05 baby, artist, and lifelong learner. He currently attends Lesley University pursuing a degree in Visual Narrative, which he finds to be a tasteful mix between creative writing and illustration. Illustration being a love of theirs from a young age and writing an eventual talent and learned craft after struggling with reading early on. Theo can be found watching YouTube video essays, attempting a kpop dance routine, verging on a nap 24/7, simultaneously dissociating and stimming at the club, or something otherwise dubiously queer in his spare time. As a multifaceted entity, Theo’s hopes are to come to an understanding with poetry as if it were a friend. His work shared on Ink and Impacts’ blog will be his debut… of sorts… if fan fiction doesn’t count.
In 2025, we successfully raised funds to support two fellows. To support the expansion of our 2026 cohort, you can contribute here. More details will be shared soon on the 2026 Stories in Bloom event. Applications for the 2026 fellowship will open in May of 2026.