Your Story Deserves to Be Written - The Miami Book Fair Is Offering a Fellowship That Could Change Everything ✍️

 Hello, dear reader - and perhaps, dear writer ✍️ 

We want to talk to you today not just as book lovers, but as people who believe deeply that stories matter. That the stories still waiting to be written matter just as much as the ones already on our shelves.

And if you — or someone you know — has a story living quietly inside them, one that keeps returning at odd hours of the day, that feels bigger than a journal entry and more urgent than a hobby — we have something important to share.

The Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships program is now accepting applications for 2026–2027. And it is, quite genuinely, one of the most remarkable opportunities available to unpublished writers right now.

Please keep reading. And then please share this with every writer in your life. 🌿

🌟 What Is the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship?

The Miami Book Fair's Emerging Writer Fellowships program offers a life-changing experience to fresh literary voices. That phrase - life-changing - is one that programs often use loosely. Here, it earns its place.

The program supports developing writers who demonstrate exceptional talent and promise by providing them with time, space, and an intellectually and culturally rich artistic community. Its goal is to actively support previously unpublished writers working to complete a book-length project within a year — and to help them launch their literary careers.

In other words: this fellowship is designed for the writer who has something real to say, who is actively working on something book-length and meaningful, and who simply needs the time, support, and community to finish it.

💛 What Fellows Actually Receive

Let's talk about what this fellowship gives you — because it is generous in every sense of the word.

Selected fellows receive a $54,000 stipend, professional development opportunities including teaching creative writing, and strong literary community support — allowing for 12 months of uninterrupted time to craft their work.

A full year. To write. With financial support, mentorship, and a literary community around you.

Fellows also receive critical mentorship from nationally established authors in their respective genres - which means you are not writing alone. You are writing alongside people who have walked the path before you, who understand the specific pressures and joys of shaping a book from the inside out.

📝 The Two Fellowships Available

Miami Book Fair is offering two Emerging Writer Fellowships for 2026–2027: the Emerging Writer Fellowship for Prose (open to fiction or nonfiction) and the Mindich Fellowship for Jewish Fiction.

Whether your book is a novel, a memoir, a collection of linked essays, or a work of Jewish fiction with a story that needs to be told — there is a space here for your voice.

💌 A Note to Every Writer Who Has Been Waiting

We want to say something directly, from one bookish community to another.

There is a particular kind of person who reads deeply and hungrily, who finishes a book and sits with it for a long time before moving on, who thinks in story structure without even trying — and who has, somewhere in the back of their mind, a book they keep meaning to write.

Maybe that person is you. Maybe it's your best friend who fills notebooks but has never shown anyone. Maybe it's the person in your book club who always has the most insightful things to say about why a story works.

Fellowships like this one exist because the literary world understands something important: talent alone is rarely enough. Writers also need time. They need money that removes the pressure to do something else. They need a community that takes their work seriously.

This is that opportunity. And it is worth applying for.

📣 Please Share This - Widely and Warmly

If this fellowship isn't for you personally, we still encourage you to share it. Put it in your BookTok comments. Send it to your writing-group groupchat. Tag the friend who has been talking about their novel for two years and just needs someone to say yes, you should actually do this.

The more people who know this exists, the more chances a deserving voice has of finding it.

Applications are open now — submit at mdc.submittable.com, and reach out to wbookfair@mdc.edu for any questions about the program.

🌿 From Readers to Writers - and Back Again

At The Bean Workshop, we are a community built by and for people who love books with their whole hearts. And we know that behind every book we love, there was a writer who found a way, sometimes against considerable odds - to finish it.

Every piece in our collection is a small act of honoring that. The stories. The people who write them. And the readers who carry them forward.

If you're a writer as well as a reader, we see you. We're cheering for you. And we hope you apply. 📖

👉 Learn more and apply at the Miami Book Fair - https://www.miamibookfair.com/fellowships/

With so much encouragement and love, The Bean Workshop 🫘