Awarded annually to midcareer professionals who have “already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” the Guggenheim fellowship provides honorees with grant money so they can work with as much creative freedom as possible.
The board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the organization’s ninety-sixth roster of fellows last week. Of the 175 artists and scholars selected this year from almost 3,000 applicants in the U.S. and Canada, nine are Texans, and five of these are writers.
Jenny Boully was born in Thailand and raised on the southwest side of San Antonio. The author of seven books, her most recent is Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life. She currently teaches at Columbia College Chicago and the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Brownsville native Oscar Cásares is a novelist, writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s creative writing program. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the author of Amigoland and Brownsville, which was selected by the American Library Association as a Notable Book of 2004. His most recent novel is Where We Come From.
A long-time contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has been writing about climate change for more than a decade, Jeff Goodell is based in Austin. Goodell’s most recent book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (Little, Brown, 2017), was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017. He is the author of five previous books.
Johnson is a Houston-based professor at Rice University, curator, activist, and author of three books. Her essay collection The Reckonings was named a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism and one of the best books of 2018; her memoir The Other Side was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Austin-based poet Lisa Olstein has written four poetry collections, including Pain Studies, an extended lyric essay that examines what it means to live with chronic pain, which was published in March. Her poetry has won a Pushcart Prize and Hayden Carruth Award, among other honors. Olstein teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA program at the University of Texas at Austin.
Awarded annually to midcareer professionals who have “already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” the Guggenheim fellowship provides honorees with grant money so they can work with as much creative freedom as possible.
A bequest in 2019 from the estate of novelist Philip Roth, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1959, is providing partial support for the wide variety of writers supported by the Foundation.
For a complete list of Guggenheim fellows, go here https://www.gf.org/fellows/
