Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Diverse Writers Grant
The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Ryan Lerrik is the winner of the 2025 Diverse Writers Grant!
Since 2014, the SLF has offered two diversity-centered grants intended to foster the creation of speculative fiction work rich in diversity. The Diverse Writers Grant is intended to support speculative fiction writers from underrepresented and underprivileged groups — such as writers of color, women, queer writers, disabled writers, etc. — whose marginalized identities may present additional obstacles in the writing and publishing process.
Lerrik’s winning piece is The Definition of Yearning.
Ryan Lerrik (they/them) is a nonbinary writer living and teaching in Massachusetts. They are working on a novel-in-stories about climate change, gender dysphoria, and how bodily transformation can be both horror and freedom. Often integrating experimental and fractured forms, the novel is a meditation on language, and how finding the words to describe the impossible can shape who we are.
Their fiction appears in Prism International, Fusion Fragment, Brink, The New Plains Review, Pathos, and Hellbender Magazine. They are also an alum of Tin House, the Juniper Institute, Lighthouse Denver, and was a semifinalist for the GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellowship. Ryan completed an MFA at Portland State University, and is pursuing an MA in English Literature at UMass Boston.
Their fiction appears in Prism International, Fusion Fragment, Brink, The New Plains Review, Pathos, and Hellbender Magazine. They are also an alum of Tin House, the Juniper Institute, Lighthouse Denver, and was a semifinalist for the GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellowship. Ryan completed an MFA at Portland State University, and is pursuing an MA in English Literature at UMass Boston.
