New Fellowship Program est. by The Rona Jaffe Foundation

New Fellowships Program established by The Rona Jaffe Foundation
posted on October 1, 2008
by Gary Clark, Writing Program Director

Johnson, VT -- The Vermont Studio Center is pleased to announce the creation of a new fellowship opportunity for women writers, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowships Program.  This program will provide a month-long, all-inclusive Vermont Studio Center residency, plus a $1,250 stipend, to one woman writer each year from 2008 through 2010. The winner of the 2008 award is fiction writer Rose Nash from Wolcott, Vermont. Rose received her B.A. and M.A. from Middlebury College. After graduating, she taught on a kibbutz in Israel for two years and then took a position teaching middle and high school English in Vermont. She is currently a writing specialist in the Learning Resource Center at Johnson State College. She is working on her first novel.

Rose Nash, 2008 recipient

There is no application process for the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowships Program.

Notably, two of the six recipients of 2008 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards (www.ronajaffefoundation.org) -- Jennifer Culkin and Therese Stanton -- are Vermont Studio Center alumna: 

Jennifer Culkin, who attended the Studio Center in November of 2006, is a critical-care RN who lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.  Her first book, A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2009, is a collection of essays that centers on her nearly 30 years of medical experience, including time as an emergency helicopter and flight nurse. Educated at Russell Sage College and The Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University, where she received her M.F.A. in 2007, her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review and The Utne Reader. Jennifer describes her next project as a “genetic” memoir. “I want to trace my family back several generations, when they arrived in Boston from Ireland and Italy, and meld our personal history and unique traits with bleeding-edge research in neuropsychology and other social and biological sciences.”

Therese Stanton attended the Studio Center in 2007. She received her B.A. from Smith College and an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Award. She is completing her first book, Reading and Writing in America, a novella and stories that address the issues of literacy and speech in America in a historical and cultural context. The title story in the collection is a harrowing and electrifying piece told by a young runaway from a Lakota reservation. The novella, “All Songs Singing,” is an inventive and ambitious exploration of the loss and preservation of language as it tells the intertwining stories of Hinto Bluestone, a fictional character, and Walt Whitman who became fascinated with Native American languages during the Civil War. Therese lives in Tillson, New York.

For more information, contact Gary Clark at the Vermont Studio Center
Gary Clark / Writing Program Director
Vermont Studio Center / gclark@vermontstudiocenter.org
802-635-2727 ext. 231 (w) / 802-730-4125 (cell)