For a writer who’s a teacher, what is summer for? Announcing 2026 Jack Hazard Fellows

OAKLAND, CA, April 9, 2026— New Literary Project (NewLit) has announced that seven creative writers who teach high school are recipients of 2026 Jack Hazard Fellowships. The Jack Hazard Fellowship is a groundbreaking initiative that awards $5,000 of support during the summer to work on writing projects for select high school teachers from around the United States. 

Seven extraordinary creative writers who also happen to be high school teachers will each receive a $5,000 fellowship from New Literary Project to spend the summer doing what they were born to do: write.

This year's Jack Hazard Fellows write fiction, nonfiction — and for the first time the fellowship has opened to poetry. Each Jack Hazard Fellow teaches full-time in an accredited high school in the United States, and they represent NewLit’s commitment to support writers across generations, communities, and divides. The award’s intention is to free teachers up to write freely during their summers.

An impressive number of worthy applicants came from states across the U.S. These writers teach at hundreds of public, private, charter, and independent schools throughout the nation—Hawaii to Illinois, Texas to North Carolina, Georgia to Maryland, Los Angeles to Boston, Oakland to New York City. 

Since 2022, New Literary Project has awarded 45 fellows across 17 states. This year, NewLit honors these 2026 Jack Hazard Fellows for exceptional writing accomplishment and promise:

Bea Chang
The Bush School - Seattle, WA

Everything We Couldn't Be (Creative Nonfiction)

Emily Cinquemani
SC Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities - Greenville, SC

Open Orbit (Poetry)


Ambalila Hemsell
Annie Wright Schools - Tacoma, WA

What is Empathy But An Animal (Poetry)


James Klise
CICS Northtown Academy - Chicago, IL

Wilderness Grace (Fiction)


Luisa Muradyan
Pembroke Hills School  - Kansas City, MO

The Ministry of Loneliness (Poetry)


Brittany Rogers
Cass Technical High School - Detroit, MI

Ribboned Together (Poetry)

Nicole Lozano Simonsen
School of Engineering & Sciences - Sacramento, CA

Paper Baby: Stories (Fiction)

Speaking of great things …

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon

A New Book from NewLit Board Member Elisa Tamarkin

Named one of Lit Hub’s most anticipated books of the year.

A searing reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of foreign reporting in the nation’s daily newspapers.

Done in a Day turns on a single event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Elisa Tamarkin’s interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her stepfather, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it—the last American correspondent to leave Saigon as it fell. His report was filed from a naval ship on the South China Sea at a time when no other telexes were going through.

Now, more than fifty years later, Tamarkin offers a social and cultural autopsy of that moment, based in personal history but vividly unfolding amid the vast documentation of America’s obvious defeat, which never seemed to register even as it got out, in the writings of journalists and essayists, in the backchannel cables between US ambassador Graham Martin and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and in photographs of the war’s end. The story is also set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in city newspapers—and of the newspapers themselves—once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, of bringing readers the “literature of the day” that was “done in a day.”

Elisa Tamarkin is the Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, both published by the University of Chicago Press.