Creative Writing Fellowships

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

2018 Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in Creative Nonfiction, Carly Fraysier, shares her work at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference this June.

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. The Wyoming Arts Council is now accepting applications for the Creative Writing Fellowships. Applications must be submitted online through submittable: www.wyomingartscouncil.submittable.com The deadline to apply is June 12, 2019.

ELIGIBILITY

• 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 must register or update their information in the Wyoming Arts Council’s Artists & 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 2020 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, if applicable, to present your work at a fellowship reading at your choice of literary conference: the Casper College Literary Conference (September 2019), WyoWriters Conference (June 2020) or the Jackson Hole
• Writer’s Conference (June 2020).
• You’ll sign a contract that verifies you’re eligible to receive this award.
• You’ll need to supply a resume, bio, and a photograph for publicity.
• The Arts Council 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 31, 2020, which asks questions about how this award helped you and what you accomplished during the year you received it.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• You may submit up to 25 pages of writing, typed double-spaced using a 12-point standard font.
• If submitting poetry, only one poem is allowed per page.
• 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 of writing, as long as you don’t exceed the 25-page limit.
• Writing may have been previously published, but don’t submit reprints.
• Work must have been created within the past five years.
• 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 pages limits, extra pages will be removed.
• Do not send supplementary materials (letters, resumes, etc.)
• All work must be combined into one document and uploaded.

JURORS

Fiction – Arna Bontemps Hemenway is the author of Elegy on Kinderklavier (Sarabande Books), winner of the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award, finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2015, A Public Space, Ecotone, Five Chapters, and The Missouri Review, among other venues. He’s been the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing at Baylor University.

Poetry – E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of two memoirs and several books of poetry including The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his work. For 17 years Miller served as the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. Miller is a two-time Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow to Israel and holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Emory and Henry College and has taught at several universities. He is host of the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and host and producer of The Scholars on UDC-TV. In recent years, Miller has been inducted into the 2015 Washington DC Hall of Fame and awarded the 2016 AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the 2016 DC Mayor’s Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. In 2018, he was appointed as an ambassador for the Authors Guild. Miller’s most recent book, If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press, was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Creative Nonfiction – Rachel Riederer writes about science, the environment, culture, and policy – sometimes at the same time. She holds a BA in environmental science and public policy from Harvard and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia. She is the co-editor-in-chief of Guernica: a magazine of global art + politics. She hails from Kansas City and currently lives in Brooklyn.

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