Creative Writing Fellowships

The Wyoming Arts Council offers two fellowship opportunities for Wyoming creative writers.

 

Creative Writing Fellowships

The Wyoming Arts Council is now accepting applications for the Creative Writing Fellowships. Applications must be submitted online through Submittable. The deadline to apply to the fellowships is June 4, 2018.

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. The format of the 2018 fellowships is as follows: 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.

ELIGIBILITY (all categories)

• Must be at least 18 years of age at time of application.
• Must not be a full-time student pursuing high school, college, or university art-related degrees.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or have legal resident status (evidence of U.S. citizenship, resident status and state residency may be required).
• May not be affiliated with the Wyoming Arts Council either as a board member or staff member, including their families, whether full-time, part-time or contractual.
• May not be an employee of the Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources.
• Must have been domiciled within the state borders for a total of 20 months in the previous two years.
• Must remain a Wyoming resident for at least one year after award, living in the state for at least 10 months of the year.
• Applicants are asked to register or update their information in the Wyoming Arts Council’s Artists and Venues Directory.
• Must not have received a Creative Writing fellowship within the last four years.
• May receive a total of two fellowship awards in your lifetime.
• You may not receive a 2018 Blanchan or Doubleday writing award, but you may enter this competition if you were a previous Blanchan or Doubleday winner.
• You may enter the competition only once by the deadline.
• You may only enter the competition in one category (Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Fiction).

WHAT IF YOU WIN AN AWARD?

• You’ll receive $3,000 up front
• You will receive an honorarium/travel stipend to present your work at a fellowship reading at your choice of literary conference: the Casper College Literary Conference (September), WyoWriters Conference (June) or the Jackson Hole Writer’s Conference (June).
• You’ll sign a contract that verifies you’re eligible to receive this award.
• You’ll need to supply a resume and a photograph for publicity.
• The WAC will retain your manuscript for possible use in excerpts for promotional purposes and Arts Council publications (print and electronic).
• You will retain all rights to this work and the work you produce during the grant period.
• You must fill out a final report form, due August 30, 2019, which asks questions about how this award helped you and what you accomplished during the year you received it.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES (Poetry)

• You may submit up to 10 pages of poetry, typed, single-spaced using a 12-point standard font.
• Submit only one poem per page.
• Writing may have been previously published, but must be submitted in manuscript form – please don’t submit/attach reprints.
• Pages must be numbered; include title of work and page number on each page.
• Your name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript.
• If you submit more than the allowable page limits, extra pages will be removed.
• Do not send supplementary materials (letters, resumes, etc.)
• Work must have been created with the past 5 years.
• All work must be combined into one document and uploaded.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES (Fiction)

• You may submit up to 25 printed pages of fiction, typed, double-spaced using a 12-point standard font.
• For a book excerpt, you may provide a synopsis, but it will be included in the 25-page limit.
• You may submit more than one piece, as long as you don’t exceed the 25-page limit.
• Writing may have been previously published, but don’t submit reprints.
• Pages must be numbered; include title of work and page number on each page.
• Your name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript.
• If you submit more than the allowable page limits, extra pages will be removed.
• Do not send supplementary materials (letters, resumes, etc.)
• Work must have been created with the past 5 years.
• All work must be combined into one document and uploaded.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES (Creative Nonfiction)

• You may submit up to 25 printed pages of nonfiction, typed, double-spaced using a 12-point standard font.
• For a book excerpt, you may provide a synopsis, but it will be included in the 25-page limit.
• You may submit more than one piece, as long as you don’t exceed the 25-page limit.
• Writing may have been previously published, but don’t submit reprints.
• Pages must be numbered; include title of work and page number on each page.
• Your name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript.
• If you submit more than the allowable page limits, extra pages will be removed.
• Do not send supplementary materials (letters, resumes, etc.)
• Work must have been created with the past 5 years.
• All work must be combined into one document and uploaded.

Jurors

Poetry – Cecily Parks is the author of two collections of poetry: Field Folly Snow (2008), finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award, and O’Nights (2015), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Prize. She is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (2016). Her poems appear in The New Republic, The New Yorker, Tin House, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Fiction – Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels Lady Lazarus and Deus Ex Machina, which NPR described as “brilliant… one of the best novels about American culture in years.”His short fiction and essays have appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Fence, One Story, and other publications, and in anthologies including Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, the Ucross Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. He was the founding Books Editor of The Rumpus and is a Contributing Editor at Zyzzyva. He lives in Fort Collins, CO, and teaches at Colorado State University.

Creative Nonfiction – Mike Scalise’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Agni, Indiewire, Ninth Letter, Paris Review Daily, and other places. He is an 826DC advisory board member, has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. His memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, was the recipient of the Center for Fiction’s Christopher Doheny Award.

2018 Blanchan and Doubleday Memorial Writing Award Recipients

Maria Lisa Eastman of Hyattville, WY
Wyoming rancher Maria Lisa Eastman hails from the suburbs of Hyattville, pop. 100. She and her husband Skip operate the Oxbow Ranch, a sometimes-for-profit hay and cattle outfit, and Rainhorse Equine Assisted Services, a verifiable non-profit, where unfortunate horses are rehabilitated to help people who have had troubles themselves. She’s been convinced from an early age that horses are her next-of-kin, and they have long been her guides. While riding colts out in the foothills of New Mexico, she began to collect and study the native grasses, and was inspired to earn a degree in range and watershed. Maria likes to think the good life she lives now was given to her by horses. Her poetry arises from the vast landscapes of northwest Wyoming, from its animals, plants, and people.

Renée Carrier of Hulett, WY 
Raised in an Air Force family, Renée Carrier began school in France and lived in five Southern states, before “migrating” to Wyoming at eighteen to attend the university, where she earned a B.A. in French. Her collection of creative, non-fiction essays, A Singular Notion, was published in 2006 by Pronghorn Press, a small press in Wyoming, under their imprint, Higher Shelf. In 2010, she edited, compiled and published, as a short run, her late father’s early aviation memoir. Devils Tower Natural History Association hired her to revise parts of The Devils Tower Climbing Handbook in 1994. The Owen Wister Review, among other anthologies, has included her work. Since January 2015, Renée has been working on a series, mainly set in the Black Hills. The Riven Country of Senga Munro is the working title of the first novel. She has completed two more, with the third presently in revision.

An honorable mention for the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award was given to Earle Layser of Alta, and an honorable mention for the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award was given to Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin from Kaycee.

Award recipients and honorable mentions are selected anonymously by jurors from outside the state. The jurors for the 2018 Blanchan and Doubleday Awards was Melissa Kwasny.

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. Poets, fiction writers, essayists, and script writers who have published no more than one book in each genre and who are not students or faculty members are invited to apply.

Previous Creative Writing Fellowship Recipients

List of Previous Recipients

 

List of Previous Blanchan and Doubleday Award Recipients