Meet the Fellows

John W. Bateman (he/him) writes and looks for stories from the Deep South. His work has appeared in places like The Chicago Tribune, The New Southern Fugitives, Electric Literature, Facing South, The Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, and on the silver screen.

He has a not-so-secret addiction to glitter and, contrary to his southern roots, does NOT like sweet tea. His first novel, “Who Killed Buster Sparkle?” was a 2020 Nominee in Fiction by the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and recipient of the 2019 Screencraft Cinematic Book Award. In 2023, John received his MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2023 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow.

Mo Kessler (they/them) is a queer multimedia object maker, installation artist, and community organizer from Kentucky. Mo’s work has been shown throughout central Appalachia and the South. They received their BFA in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007 and their MFA in Studio Art from Western Carolina University in 2021. Mo was a co-founder of the LIVLAB Artist Collective at Western Carolina University and the founder of Shelter In Place (SiP), an online artist residency program for artists engaged in community organizing and activism during the beginning of the Covid pandemic. As a community organizer, Mo has worked on campaigns against racial injustice, food insecurity, foreclosures, police brutality, and Mountain-Top Removal.