Creative Writing Fellowships

2019 Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in Fiction, David Romtvedt, shares his work at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference.

Creative Writing Fellowships

WHAT IS A CREATIVE WRITING FELLOWSHIP?

Creative Writing fellowships are awards of merit, based on a writer’s body of work, and honoring Wyoming’s literary artists whose work reflects serious and exceptional writing. One fellowship will be awarded in each category of Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction, for a total of three fellowships. Applications are juried by noted authors, literary agents, or writing professionals from outside the state. Jurors may award honorable mentions. Recipients of the Creative Writing fellowships will share their work at a Wyoming literary conference. Submissions are currently not being accepted. Applications for the next round of fellowships will open in spring 2020.

2020 Creative Writing Fellowship Recipients

Poetry | Jason Stenar Clark | Laramie, WY

Jason Stenar Clark was born in Canyon County, Idaho in 1979 to Beverly Gault of Iowa and Jim Clark of Laramie, Wyoming. His education includes a Bachelor’s of Arts with High Honors in Politics from Oberlin College and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming. Before moving to Wyoming in 2007, Jason worked as a legal assistant at a Federal civil rights firm, a lab assistant at a reproductive health clinic, a middle school language arts teacher in the Mississippi Delta, and a busboy in San Francisco. Subsequent to his M.F.A degree, he managed grants at the Wyoming Community Foundation and then provided instruction in Western political philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, teaching everything from Plato to James Madison. His work as a poet appears in a variety of online publications, in ‘zines, and, most recently, he has published  opinion essays for the statewide news-magazine, WyoFile.com. He is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and is a person with disabilities. He believes in equality.

Creative Nonfiction | Chad Hanson | Casper, WY

Chad Hanson serves as Chair of the Department of Social & Cultural Studies at Casper College. His nonfiction titles include, Swimming with Trout (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and Trout Streams of the Heart (Truman State University Press, 2013). He is also the author of two collections of poems: Patches of Light (Red Dragonfly Press, 2014) and This Human Shape (Red Dragonfly Press, 2016). In addition, he conducts research on education and social change. Hanson served as editor of the book, In Search of Self: Exploring Student Identity Development (Jossey-Bass, 2014). For more information, visit: www.chadhanson.org.

Fiction | Erin Jones | Laramie, WY

Erin Jones is Wyoming Public Radio’s cultural affairs producer, as well as the host and senior producer of the storytelling podcast HumaNature. She earned her BA from The University of Texas at Austin in geography, and her MFA from the University of Wyoming in creative writing and environment and natural resources.Erin’s writing has won the Frank Nelson Doubleday Award, a Kimmel Harding Nelson residency, and publications in The Normal School and Western Confluence. Her audio work has won three national awards and broadcast on over one hundred NPR member stations. Erin grew up in Texas, Utah, and Georgia, and has lived in Wyoming since 2013. Her partner in crime is a Hurricane Harvey rescue lab mix named Frankie. She—Erin, not Frankie—is at work on a novel about her ancestors.

Honorable mentions were awarded to Tiyana Knittel of Cody in the poetry category and David Zoby of Casper in the creative nonfiction category.

2019 Pattie Layser Greater Yellowstone Creative Writing and Journalism Fellowship

The Wyoming Arts Council, with generous funding from The Pattie and Earle Layser Memorial Fund announces the Greater Yellowstone Creative Writing and Journalism Fellowship. This new fellowship is a national call open to writers and journalists and seeks to intersect science, education, current events, and conservation to effectively communicate the Greater Yellowstone’s natural history and singular importance to society through creative and exceptional writing and subject communication.

Applications for the 2019 Fellowship have closed. creative writers and those in the field of journalism who demonstrate serious inquiry and dedication to the Greater Yellowstone Region through their work should check back in early 2020 for the next round of applications.

2019 Fellowship Recipient

Melodie Edwards of Laramie, WY

As a reporter with Wyoming Public Media, Melodie Edwards covers a wide variety of Wyoming topics from wildlife to Native American issues to agriculture. She is currently working on a civil discourse project called, “I Respectfully Disagree,” interviewing people in the state who are modeling how people find compromise to make change. She is the recipient of a national PRNDI award for her investigation of the reservation housing crisis and several regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, two for “best use of sound.”

Melodie grew up in Walden, Colorado where her father worked in the oilfield and timber industries and her mother was the editor of the Jackson County Star. She graduated with an MFA from the University of Michigan on a Colby Fellowship and received two Hopwood Awards there for fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award, also offered through the Wyoming Arts Council, and is the author of, “Hikes Around Fort Collins” (Pruett Publishing). Melodie and her husband own Night Heron Books and Coffeehouse. She also loves to putz in the garden, and hike and ski in the mountains with her daughters and her dad.

Neltje Blanchan and Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Awards 

The Frank Nelson Doubleday Award of $1,000 is given for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script written by a woman writer. The Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award, $1,000, is given annually for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script which is informed by a relationship with the natural world. Both awards are designed to bring attention to writers in Wyoming who have not yet received wide recognition for their work, and to support emerging writers at crucial times in their careers. Applications for the 2019 awards have closed. Poets, fiction writers, essayists, and script writers interested in these awards should check back in early 2020 for the next round of applications.

2019 Award Recipients

After growing up in California, Lyndi Waters toured the U.S. and Canada trick riding at PRCA rodeos before moving to Wyoming in 1976. She has a degree in nursing, and recently finished an unpublished chapbook of poems titled, “In the Key of Green Tractor.” Lyndi is a Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2018 Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest, and was awarded third place in the 2019 Shea contest. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in anthologies and literary journals such as, “Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers” (Sastrugi Press, 2016), “Troubadour” (Picaroon Poetry Press, U.K., 2017), “The Owen Wister Review,” “Gyroscope Review,” “Unbroken Journal,” “The New Verse News,” and others. Lyndi lives in Kaycee with a few chickens, and an old bulldog who has a wicked skin condition and loves avocado.

Previous Creative Writing Fellowship Recipients