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  • About Us
    • 60+ Years of Friends
    • Board
    • Staff
    • Our Supporters
    • Financials
    • Blog >
      • History Series
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    • Sign-Up for Newsletter
  • Support Us
    • Donate
    • Leadership Circle
    • Innovation Circle
    • Leave a Legacy Gift
    • The Pacifics
    • Gift of appreciated stock
    • Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD)
    • Other ways to give
    • Library Preservation Fund
  • What We Fund
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    • Bookstore
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  • Laureates 2023
    • Laureate Authors
  • Events
  • Residencies
    • Brown Handler Writer's Residency ​
    • James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Fellowship
  • Volunteer

​​Brown Handler Writer's Residency
At the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library
​

This Residency, funded by Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler's generosity, is designed to nurture emerging and established San Francisco based writers by guaranteeing them access to free, adequate space and bringing them into direct collaboration with the Library for literary activities. This program honors the vital connection between the public Library and the literary world.
There would be no libraries without writers--and there would be no writers without libraries. We're very proud to help provide, in a city increasingly unaffordable to artists, a space in which our local writers can work, to ensure the survival of both. - Daniel Handler
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Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler

​Congrats to our 2023-2024 Brown-Handler Residents!
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​Brendan McHugh
Brendan McHugh is a San Francisco based writer and public historian. His writing focuses on the Bay Area's vast queer past and present, specifically the first decades of the AIDS Epidemic. He's at work on a book proposal that tells the story of San Francisco's own volunteer AIDS care response through the work of Shanti Project. His articles and essays have been published by Brokeass Stuart, KQED, Catapult, Made by History for Washingtonpost.com, JSTOR Daily News, The (old) Bold Italic, Nursing Clio, Lady Science, Contingent Magazine, and The Better Because Collective.  

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​Flávia Stefani
Flávia Stefani is a Brazilian writer and literary translator based in San Francisco, CA. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from Disquiet International and the Black Mountain Institute. One of her stories is forthcoming in an anthology from Companhia das Letras | Penguin Random House, and another was a finalist at the 2020 Craft Short Fiction Prize. A former assistant editor at Guernica and Witness Magazine, Flávia is working on a novel and a short-story collection. 

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​René Peña-Govea
René Peña-Govea​ is a San Francisco born and raised librarian, musician, and writer. At fifteen, she won the bilingual literary magazine El Andar's Paula Award for Literary Excellence, sponsored by Isabel Allende. Her poem, "At Home" was published in Poetry in Flight/ Poesía en vuelo: Anthology in Celebration of El Tecolote. Her music has appeared on KTVU's SF Loves Learning, in the SOMArts show Muni Raised Me, and on radio stations and in libraries throughout the Bay Area. She is a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree, and is working on her first YA novel.  ​

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​Sam Santos Julian
Sam Santos Julian is currently writing and illustrating Octopolis, an eco-punk graphic novel about intelligent cephalopods on a post-human earth. Sam began his career as a game and product designer, most recently at Goodreads.com, before returning to his first passion of cartooning. His dedication to environmental conservation is evident in his work, which raises awareness about the fragility of marine biodiversity. When not creating, Sam enjoys birdwatching, scuba diving, and taking his dog to the beach.

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​Yeva Johnson
Yeva Johnson is the author of Analog Poet Blues (Nomadic Press, 2023).  Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Obsidian, sin cesar, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere.  She Co-edited Joan Nestle’s book A Sturdy Yes of a People, a Sinister Wisdom Sapphic Classic.  Yeva is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence (RADAR Productions/San Francisco Public Library), Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at Mesa Refuge, and poet in QTPOC4SHO, a San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective.  Yeva is currently working on a full-length manuscript of poems.


Former Brown Handler Writer's Residents 
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From left: tanea lunsford lynx, Jenny Qi, Lindsey Smith, Douglas Henderson, and Preeti Vangani

(2022-2023)
tanea lunsford lynx
Jenny Qi
Lindsey Smith
Douglas Henderson
Preeti Vangani
(2020-2021)
Yalitza Ferreras
Kristin Keane
Justine Mccauley
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco
Shelley Wong
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From left Shruti Swamy, Amanda Moore, Earle McCartney
(2019-2020)
Earle McCartney
Amanda Moore
Mia Paschal
Maddy Raskulinecz
Shruti Swamy
(2018 - 2019)
​Chaney Kwak
Kathleen McClung
Susie Nadler
Kevin Simmonds
K-Fai Steele

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About

Friends & Foundation of the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Public Library announce the creation of the Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler Writer’s Residency. Made possible by the generosity of Daniel Handler and Lisa Brown, the residency is designed to provide writers with free, adequate and accessible space in which to produce creative work, and to connect writers with the San Francisco Public Library in the course of producing and sharing their work in the community. 

Friends and the San Francisco Public Library have multiple interests in creating this residency: to nurture the creative expression of diverse writers; to engage writers with the Library as partners in creating and sharing work with the community; and to assist writers by providing writing studio space available at no cost at the Friends’ office.  
 
Reflecting the Library’s mission as a democratic, public and accessible institution, we are committed to supporting writers from a wide spectrum of ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, ability and genre.  
 
Eligibility and Requirements Residencies will be offered to five writers for a period of one year, open to: 
• Fiction writers 
• Nonfiction writers 
• Children’s writers and illustrators 
• Poets 
​• Playwrights/screenwriters
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Learn More
Learn more about the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Fellowship:

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