Kupala

The Kupala Fellowship

The Kupala Fellowship supports writers who are eager to expand their creative reach—with a little help from their local book coach. 

The fellowship celebrates what Kupala is all about: Pushing our creative edges. 

 

Unlike Kupala’s other offerings, this program is not limited to published authors. It is open to writers of all levels working on memoir, knowledge-share nonfiction, or literary fiction. What matters most is your willingness to grow—and your ability to commit at least six hours per week to your book for six months. We’re not measuring where you begin, but how far you’re willing to go.

 

This is a place-based fellowship, designed to serve the local creative community. Applicants must live in or around Tacoma, Washington, or be able to meet in person twice a month in Tacoma. While all locals are welcome to apply, the fellowship prioritizes writers who would not otherwise have access to this level of support. 

 

Applications for the 2026 Kupala Fellowship open in January 2026. Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to know.

Meet the 2025 Kupala Fellow!

Vanna Sing is a community organizer and the founder of Tacoma Healing Awareness Community, a grassroots organization that supports Southeast Asian families impacted by incarceration, deportation, and generational trauma.

 

Born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in Tacoma’s Eastside Salishan neighborhood, Vanna has spent more than four decades witnessing—and working to transform—the cycles of harm that shape her community. She brings to her writing the same fierce commitment that defines her organizing work.

 

Vanna is currently working on her first book, a guide to personal transformation for men in prison. Her book encourages men to stop numbing their inner pain and turn toward it instead, to begin the real work of healing. She writes not as an outsider, but as a friend, grounded in lived experience. The men she visits are not strangers. They are men she once knew on the streets. Some she has loved. Some she has survived. Vanna understands both the hurt they carry and the harm they’ve done. And, just as clearly, she sees their potential to take accountability and grow. 

 

Vanna knows that this type of transformation is possible, because she’s working toward it too. This is a book about healing written from inside the healing process, by someone who's actively doing the work. 

Have questions about the Kupala Fellowship?