Wyoming Arts Council

Announcing the 2018 Creative Writing Fellowship Recipients


The Wyoming Arts Council is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Creative Writing Fellowships. They each will receive a $3,000 award plus will share their work publicly through readings and workshops. Categories in 2018 include Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction, for a total of three fellowships. And the winners are:

Poetry: Cara Rodriguez of Casper, WY
Cara Rodriguez earned her MA in Poetry in 2004 from the University of Wyoming.  She is currently an English instructor at Casper College.  Her work draws from day-to- day life and relationship, exploring themes of forgiveness, shame, and identity, as well as what it means to be a witness.  Her craft, at times, extends into visual poetry in the form of mixed media and erasure. She has been most recently published in Zetetic, Clerestory,  and The Found Poetry Review.

Ben Werner headshot courtesy of Mike Vanata

Fiction: Ben Werner of Cody, WY
Ben Werner is from Cody, Wyoming, where he lives and works as an arborist.  He earned a BA in English from the University of Wyoming in 2011.  In his work, Werner explores the various functions of memory: its instigations, its usurpations, its ignorance and its bracing clarity, its poignant deceptions and its ghostly half-realized cargoes of emotion, and ultimately, its role in in our largely imaginary understanding of ourselves.

Creative Nonfiction: Carly Fraysier of Clearmont, WY
Carly Fraysier was born in Wyoming, but grew up in Vermont. She earned an MFA in creative writing and environment and natural resources from the University of Wyoming and BA in English and Environmental Studies from St. Lawrence University. Her writing has appeared in Western Confluence Magazine, and she was named a finalist for Missouri Review’s 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ prize. She currently accounts for one of the twenty-five people living in Ucross, Wyoming, where she  works for Ucross Foundation.

Honorable mentions in this year’s contest include Claudia Mauro of Jackson and Lori Howe of Laramie for Poetry, Andrew Munz of Jackson and Court Merrigan of Torrington for Fiction, and Jennifer Kocher of Douglas and Tina Welling of Jackson for Creative Nonfiction.

Fellowship recipients and honorable mentions are selected anonymously by jurors from outside the state. Jurors for the 2018 Creative Writing Fellowships were Bill Tremblay (Poetry), Kelly Luce (Fiction), and Justin St. Germain (Creative Nonfiction).

For more information on this program, contact Rachel Clifton at (307) 777-5305 or rachel.clifton@wyo.gov.


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