The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded a creative writing fellowship to Kevin Haworth, Carlow University’s director of the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program.
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Kevin Haworth, Carlow’s New Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, Is One of 37 Recipients Nationwide
Pittsburgh, Pa. – The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has awarded a creative writing fellowship of $25,000 to Kevin Haworth, director of the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Carlow University.
Haworth was selected from among 1,763 eligible applicants by 23 readers and panelists. Only 37 fiction and/or nonfiction writers nationwide received this honor. Through its creative writing fellowships program, the NEA gives writers the time and space to create, revise, conduct research, and connect with readers.
“I’m incredibly honored to receive an NEA, particularly because the judging process is completely anonymous and based exclusively on prose submissions,” says Haworth, who has been director of Carlow’s MFA program since July. “The generosity of this award affords me the freedom to continue my focus of the past few years—essays on parenting, literature, and Israeli and Palestinian culture. It will also support me as I complete my current book, a scholarly and narrative biography of Tel Aviv-based graphic novelist Rutu Modan for University Press of Mississippi.”
Haworth is the author of three books—Famous Drownings in Literary History, The Discontinuity of Small Things, and Far Out All my Life—and co-editor of Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters of the Art & Craft of Writing. His essays and short stories have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, among others, and he writes a monthly column for Michigan Quarterly Review. Winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Outstanding Debut Fiction and first runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Haworth has received fellowships from Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Ledig International Writers House. Haworth has taught writing and literature at Arizona State University, Antioch Writers Workshop, 826 Michigan, Ohio University, and Tel Aviv University. He currently lives in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood with his children, Zev and Ruthie.
Established in 1965, the NEA has awarded more than $5 billion in grants in every state and U.S. jurisdiction, the only arts funder in the nation to do so. In its first grant announcement of its 50th anniversary year, the NEA awarded individual creative writing fellowships of $25,000 each to 37 fiction and creative nonfiction writers, including Haworth.
“Since its inception, the creative writing fellowship program has awarded more than $45 million to a diverse group of more than 3,000 writers, many of them emerging writers at the start of their careers,” said NEA Director of Literature Amy Stolls. “These 37 extraordinary new fellows, including Kevin Haworth, provide more evidence of the NEA’s track record of discovering and supporting excellent writers.”
The NEA’s creative writing fellowships program is arguably the most egalitarian grant program in its field: applications are free and open to the public; fellows are selected through an anonymous review process in which the sole criterion is artistic excellence; and the judging panel varies year to year and is always diverse with regard to geography, ethnicity, gender, age, and life experience.
Since 1990, 81 of the 138 American recipients of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were previous NEA creative writing fellows.
To join the Twitter conversation about this announcement, please use #NEAFall15. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, go to arts.gov
Carlow’s Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program, a five semester, low-residency curriculum, uniquely provides students with the opportunity to work and study with internationally-renowned writers in the United States and Ireland. Each year, students complete two 11-day residencies. In January, students come together for lectures, workshops, and time to grow as a literary community in Pittsburgh, a city known for its world-class teaching and research institutes. In June, students travel to Trinity College in Dublin to work with Irish mentors and experience Ireland’s rich literary tradition.
Please visit www.carlow.edu/Master_of_Fine_Arts_in_Creative_Writing.aspx, for more information about Carlow’s MFA program.
### About Carlow University
Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carlow University was founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1929. Offering both undergraduate and graduate programs, Carlow University is a comprehensive master’s institution dedicated to learner-centered education at the collegiate levels and at the elementary school level in the Campus School of Carlow University.