The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is pleased to announce that Pritha Bhattacharyya and Sophie Panzer have been selected by author and educator Yahdon Israel as the 2020 recipients of A Suite of One’s Own: A Writer’s Residency. Made possible by the support of The Roosevelt Hotel, this annual Writer’s Residency enables two Alumni of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards to travel to New York City and spend five nights at the historic Roosevelt Hotel. Over the course of the Residency, Bhattacharyya and Panzer will be granted the time and space to focus on their writing projects, and receive opportunities to meet with literary professionals.
Meet the Residents
Pritha Bhattacharyya (’11)
Website: https://prithabhattacharyya.wordpress.com/
Pritha Bhattacharyya is a Bengali-American writer. She received her M.F.A. in fiction from Boston University and was a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow based in Osaka, Japan, for Fall 2019. She received her B.A. from Cornell University. Her work has been recognized by the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s 2019 Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work appears in Ninth Letter, Nashville Review, Bodega, RHINO, Apogee Journal, and elsewhere.
During the residency, Pritha will revise a number of short stories that address South Asian immigration effects, familial struggles, class and race divisions, and sexual identity in the larger scope of the Bengali-American experience.
Sophie Panzer (’15)
Sophie Panzer earned her BA at McGill University and currently works as a journalist. She is the author of the chapbooks Bone Church (dancing girl press 2020), Mothers of the Apocalypse (Ethel Press 2019) and Survive July (Red Bird Chapbooks 2019). Sophie was a 2017 Quebec Writers Federation Literary Prize for Young Writers winner and a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. She has also edited prose for Inklette and Scrivener Creative Review. Her work has appeared in Coffin Bell Journal, The Hellebore, Lavender Review, Josephine Quarterly, Gingerbread House, PULP Literature, carte blanche, and others.
During the residency, Sophie hopes to complete three short stories for a series of queer fairy tales. The series, which draws from the time Sophie spent teaching English as a second language in the Czech Republic, highlights the legend of the golem and its potential for exploring themes of gender, embodiment, queerness, and religion.