Creative Writing Fellowships

Creative Writing Fellowships

Creative Writing fellowships are $3,000 unrestricted 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 is 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 share their work at one of the three Wyoming literary conferences. Applications are now open; the deadline to apply is June 9, 2023.

Apply here!

---

Jurors 

Ramona Ausubel | Fiction

Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of three novels and two story collections. Her new novel, The Last Animal, came out in the spring of 2023. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, California and Colorado Book Awards and long-listed for the Story Prize, Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award and New York Times Notable Book selections. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The New York Times, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, and collected in The Best American Fantasy and online in The Paris Review.   She has been a finalist for the Puschart Prize and a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Ramona has taught at Tin House, The Community of Writers, Writing X Writers, the Low-Residency MFA programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Bennington. She is an assistant professor at Colorado State University.

Katherine Standefer | Creative Nonfiction

Katherine Standefer’s debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Memoir, selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The book was named one of Oprah Magazine‘s “Best Books of Fall 2020,” selected as the Common Read 2022-2023 at Colorado College, and featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. Standefer’s previous writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and won the Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and spent time as a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good.

Juan J. Morales | Poetry

Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of threepoetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times. His fourth collection is forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press. His poetry has recently appeared in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review, Acentos Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, terrain.org, Poetry, the anthology Infinite Constellations, and elsewhere. Morales is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondo Fellow, the editor/publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities Arts & Social Sciences at Colorado State University Pueblo.

 

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 are currently closed.

2023 Award Recipients

Ann Stebner Steele | Laramie | Frank Nelson Doubleday Award

Ann Stebner Steele is a writer, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, teacher, horsewoman, backpacker, water-lover. She is a fifth generation Wyomingite who loves the wide horizons, dynamic skies, and sage-covered hills of the place where she lives. She was born in Rawlins, Wyoming and raised in the Red Desert and the Wind River Mountains. After she completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho, she and her husband returned to Wyoming and now live in Laramie with their son, two dogs, one cat, and one horse. Her work has been published in “Orion,” “Souvenir Lit Journal,” “Western Confluence Magazine,” and the anthology “Atlantic City: Voices from a Powerful Place.” She has also been featured reading her work on Public Radio International’s “Living on Earth” program.

 

India Hayford | Casper | Neltje Blanchan Award

India Hayford is a naturalist, historical reenactor, teacher, and artist. Her short stories and feature articles have appeared in various regional and national publications, including “Threads and Needle Arts.” For the last eight years she has written The “Howl,” a quarterly wildlife newsletter with national distribution. She is the author of two books on embroidery design and is writing a third about Yemenite Jewish embroidery.  She recently completed a novel, “Hiraeth,” and is working on a short story collection to be published in 2024. India lives in Natrona County with her husband, Roy, with whom she shares two children, two grandchildren, and half a dozen dogs and cats.

Honorable mentions were awarded to Sarah Hamilton of Casper, Catherine Reeves of Cheyenne, and Amy Hollon of Laramie for the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award. Pamela Galbreath and Callie Plaxco of Laramie and Kathleen Smith of Gillette received honorable mentions for the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award.

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 Pattie Layser Greater Yellowstone Creative Writing and Journalism Fellowship. Open to writers and journalists, this fellowship 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.

This annual prestigious fellowship of $3,500 will be awarded to a creative writer (poetry, fiction, nonfiction), or those in the field of journalism (writer, photojournalist, videographer, documentary filmmaker, online or print media) who demonstrate serious inquiry and dedication to the Greater Yellowstone region through their work. Established and recognized authors are being sought, but emerging and mid-career writers are also encouraged to apply. Applications are currently closed. Applications for the next round will open in January 2024.

2023 Award Recipient

Austin Kirchhoff | Bozeman, Montana

Austin was born and raised in the Paradise Valley of southwest Montana, the daughter of a teacher and a sometimes rancher, sometimes horse trainer, sometimes outfitter. She learned to ride a horse before she learned to ride a bike, accompanying her dad on guided trail rides and helping him move cattle on high pastures bordering Yellowstone National Park.

She attended Kindergarten through 12th grade at the Gardiner School, Yellowstone’s north entrance, and spent summers working for her parents and seasonal rafting companies and coffee shops, becoming part of the economic biome that she writes about in the rural west. 

Austin attended Yale as an undergrad where she focused on global affairs and economic development and earned a fellowship to study income inequality in South Africa. She took poetry and literature classes on the side: her first true intellectual loves. After short stints in healthcare technology, finance, and marketing roles, Austin made her way back to Montana. She attended the University of Montana, earning master’s degrees in business analytics and environmental studies with a focus on environmental writing.

Now Austin splits her time between independent consulting work and personal writing projects. She will use the fellowship award to expand upon her master’s thesis, writing critically about the character of the Greater Yellowstone region and her own role in shaping it, recognizing that the tourism industry that supported her family is a double-edged sword: it props up an ecosystem of dude ranches, rafting companies, and Airbnb owners; but it also sucks the life out of local communities, pricing out working families, bankrupting local schools, and enabling a make-believe-cowboy lifestyle. Her work wrestles with a complicated family legacy and contemplates how her own children might experience this land given the pace of change – both ecological and economic – thrust upon it.

Austin lives in Bozeman, MT with her husband and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of their first child (any day now!). They talk about leaving Bozangeles all the time, but probably never will.

Honorable Mentions were given to Jeffrey Lockwood and Gregory Nickerson of Laramie and Julie Rubini of Toledo, Ohio.

Previous Creative Writing Fellowship Recipients

 

Previous Layser Fellowship Recipients

 

Previous Blanchan and Doubleday Award Recipients