November 2016 ~ Issue 14
Maria Fernanda Snellings is a poet, writer, and organizer. As a transracial adoptee, she identifies as Black-Ecuatoriana, along with her adoptive parents’ ethnicity stemming from Louisiana. A D.C. native, she is a 2014 VONA/Voices Of Our Nation Fellow, an undergraduate finalist for the 2014 Hurston/Wright Amistad Award for College Writers in Poetry, and a co-recipient of the 2015 Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry, recognizing a poet whose work examines relationships among women as it relates to justice. Upcoming, she is one of three queer poets selected to be profiled in a queer photo ethnography project composed by multimedia artist and producer Danielle Levy. The project ultimately explores the concept of home.
Since moving to New York City in 2015, she has performed at MoMaPS1’s 2015 NY Art Book Fair, LALSA’s 2016 FIESTA, the Queens Festival’s 2016 Lit Crawl, and the La Pluma y La Tinta’s Declaraciones: Words from the Diaspora, a curated reading held at WordUp Bookshop Librería Comunitaria featuring AfroLatinx writers and poets. Maria Fernanda’s poems and translations have appeared most recently in The Wide Shore’s 2016 issue, Kweli Journal 2016 Spring-Summer issue, and the 92nd Street Y’s 2016 Words We Live In series. She has conceptualized and organized with Living In My Skin curator & Bronx-native Yelaine Rodriquez to produce the Quisqueya-centered exhibit’s poetry reading.
Presently Maria Fernanda is co-founding a workshop to support Latinx writers who self-identify as persons of African descent and/or as Black with a connection to Latin American and/or US Latino/a/x culture to explore poetry, find or exchange resources, and strengthen their craft.
She is crafting poems in collaboration with the upcoming Black Liberation Music project and the Daughters of Elysium, a collective of women who integrate modern perspective with myth in the theater. She and fellow queer poet I.S. Jones are slated to release a podcast with the Indie Creative Network, a collective of podcasts reaching as far as Canada and South Africa.
Maria Fernanda is planning a release of her first chapbook in the Summer of 2017.