“I’m writing a novel about Catholic church closures in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods, exploring how people made sense of profound spatial and spiritual upheaval. Tulsa and Detroit share something powerful: they both loom large in how we understand the transformation of Black space in America. I’m eager to engage with Tulsa’s Black religious histories and oral traditions, and to be in a sustained artistic community with my cohort. The fellowship offers both the solitude my work requires and the collaborative energy I’ve been craving for years.”
LITERARY NONFICTION, TRANSLATION
AARON ROBERTSON
Aaron Robertson is a writer, journalist, translator from Italian, and a Tulsa Artist Fellow. He is the inaugural Centennial Fellow at Commonweal magazine. His nonfiction debut, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), won the Bridge Book Award, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Hooks National Book Award, and the Zora Award for Nonfiction, and was named a best book of 2024 by more than a dozen outlets and institutions, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, The Boston Globe, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Michigan.
His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon (Two Lines Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, and other honors. He has contributed to the anthologies Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022) and The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2019). A recipient of support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, Robertson has written for The New York Times, the Detroit Metro Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications.
A former editor at the independent publishing house Spiegel & Grau, he has served as a writing coach for the Detroit Writing Room, a board member for the American Literary Translators Association, an advisory editor for The Paris Review, and a judge for the 2024 International Booker Prize.
