Featured News, Grant News | August 8, 2014
The Wyoming Arts Council is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s creative writing fellowships in fiction. They are Estella Soto of Laramie and Shawn Klomparens of Jackson.
They each will receive a $3,000 award plus a $500 stipend to travel to Casper to read their work on Saturday, Sept. 13, 2-4 p.m., at the Equality State Book Festival at Casper College.
This is the first year that both the WAC fellowship winners and the recipients of its Blanchan and Doubleday writing awards will be reading together. Joining Soto and Klomparens at the reading will be fellowship judge Meg Pokrass, a flash-fiction author from San Francisco, Blanchan winner Darcy Lipp-Acord of Weston, Doubleday recipient Yvette Ward-Horner of Cody and Blanchan/Doubleday judge Ken Waldman, a poet and musician from Alaska who now makes his home in Louisiana.
Estella Soto is a writer and educator who received a bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Wyoming. She designed and taught a creative writing workshop at the Wyoming Girls School in Sheridan and was project manager for the 2012 Young Writers of Color reading held in Laramie. Her winning short story is entitled “Shopping for Portia.” Soto blogs at http://stellastories.tumblr.com
Jackson’s Shawn Klomparens just celebrated his 20th year in Wyoming. He is the author of two novels, Two Years, No Rain and Jessica Z. He won a fellowship for an excerpt from a novel, The Banks of Certain Rivers. He is active on social media and lectures about promoting books on Facebook and other online sites. His web site is http://www.shawnklomparens.com/
This is the 29th year for the creative writing fellowships sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council. Next year’s category will be poetry. Applications will be available in spring 2015.
For more information, contact Michael Shay at 307-777-5234 or mike.shay@wyo.gov
The Wyoming Arts Council believes that experiencing the arts should be accessible for all, including people with mental and/or physical disabilities, older adults, military/veterans, people living in institutions and those who lack access to the arts due to geographic isolation, cultural difference and economic hardship.
