Out of a competitive pool of more than 250 applicants, we’ve chosen Jacqui Germain — a St. Louis–based journalist, trained organizer, and poet — as our fellow. Jacqui most recently worked as a writer on Mic’s politics team, and her work has been published in outlets includingThe NationThe GuardianThe AtlanticElle Every aspect of being a young person in this country — from theability to afford higher educationto thequality of schoolingthekinds of careers we can aspire towardand our access tomedical careandfood You may not have fully understood what it meant, but there it was: “Land back.” I think it really was a huge thing and in so many different ways. I think Providence Rhode Island, in the '70s and '80s when I was growing up there, was a pretty interesting place. It was a place where I, at least in the neighborhood that I lived in, encountered so many people from really different backgrounds than my own. In terms of people who had immigrated recently from other countries, people who had racial and ethnic backgrounds different than mine, people who had different spiritual beliefs and religions, and also people who occupied really different economic brackets than my parents. I also grew up in a neighborhood where there were a lot of educators of different types, so I think that was a really influential thing. My mom’s of Italian and German heritage but she was raised in the Middle East and my dad’s a professor so I think that combination of having a family that really valued a connection between different cultures, and then being in an environment where I experienced that in a really natural way was a really big part of how I started to think about the world and start to look at what felt important to me about the world and then, of course, that filtered into my life as a creative person. I also think that Providence was an interesting place too. It had an arts school and a number of colleges and then also a really vibrant creative life. It was a city, which especially when I was a kid, was totally broke, was run by the mob, and there wasn’t a lot to do and I think most people across the board tended to entertain themselves by some kind of creative activity… I feel like I grew up in a very creative environment. So much of what has been important to me about being an artist got forged in that crucible of directly where I grew up as a kid.”TV