Congratulations to Taslim Tagore and Chelsea Wu for being selected for the 2022 Poetry Mentorship!

Gemini Ink is thrilled to announce that our 2022 Mentor, award-winning poet Laura Van Prooyen, has selected her two mentees for the 2022 year. Taslim Tagore and Chelsea Wu will work with Van Prooyen for a six-month personalized poetry writing mentorship that will include discussion and advice about writing habits, goal setting, writing practice with extensive feedback toward revision, and guidance toward manuscript submission and publication. During the mentorship period, the mentees may work on several new poems or make progress on a book-length manuscript.  A public reading of their work will take place in the summer or fall of 2022 to close out their project. Thank you to all the writers who submitted their work. It was such a talented pool of applicants this year!

Each year, two writers, through our Gemini Ink Mentorship Program, are chosen to work one-on-one with a nationally recognized poet or prose writer to develop a manuscript-length project. It is open to writers from all 50 States, alternating in genre each year. Other mentorship opportunities will be offered in 2022— keep an eye out for these.

About the 2022 Poetry Mentees

Taslim Tagore is a writer, trauma therapist, and healer who founded a community healing center called the Reciprocity Wellspace in Manhattan. She’s been writing poetry and memoir with other essential workers since the pandemic and leads Healing & Writing workshops across New York City’s social services system. Her publications include Seasons of Thanks and See Me: Transforming New York City’s Homeless Youth, and her poetry has been featured in Medium and various grassroots and national publications. 

Chelsea Wu is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio and intends to become an internal medicine physician. She received her Bachelor’s degree at Rice University in Houston, TX, in English Literature and Biochemistry and is passionate about integrating the humanities into medicine. Wu currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of her medical school’s literary journal Connective Tissue. She is excited to start residency training next year and hopes to continue her lifelong passion for the literary arts as a physician-writer.

The 2022 Poetry Mentor

Laura Van Prooyen is the author of three collections of poetry: Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books), Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press), nominated by Philip Levine, and winner of the McGovern Prize, and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press). She is also co-author with Gretchen Bernabei of Text Structures from Poetry, a book of writing lessons for educators of grades 4-12 (Corwin Literacy). A graduate of Purdue University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Van Prooyen is a recipient of grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, the American Association of University Women, Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2015 Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award, the Annual Glenna Luschei Award for poems in Prairie Schooner, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Award, and residencies from The Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Van Prooyen is the founder of Next Page Press, publishing contemporary poetry with a focus on second and third books. She teaches poetry in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program at Miami University of Ohio and facilitates Poetic Record: Resilience Workshops for Healthcare Workers. She lives in San Antonio, TX.

Teen Mentorship

Gregg Barrios Teen Mentorship info coming soon.