Applications Now Open for 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship
New Literary Project is now taking applications for the second round of annual Jack Hazard Summer Fellowships. 2023 Fellowships of $5,000 each will be awarded to full-time educators who are creative writers teaching in accredited high schools in the United States. In Summer 2022, NewLit awarded eight $5,000 fellowships to California teachers. Applications close 4 January 2023; ten to twelve Summer 2023 recipients are expected to be announced in March 2023.
Jack Hazard Fellows must be writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir.
They commit to concentrating upon their creative writing during Summer 2023.
They must be full-time, current instructors (in any department, not just English) in an accredited high school (grades 9–12, teaching in the 2022–23 academic year).
They must be contracted to return to full-time teaching in Fall 2023.
Applicants must submit a writing sample along with other related support material requested.
Consult the website for details and procedures.
Link to apply here.
Jack Hazard Fellowships honor, reward, and incentivize talented writers who teach in secondary schools. These writers-who-teach inspire their students, high schools, and communities, and provide a professional model of writers working to find meaning and to create art in chaotic times. With these fellowships, NewLit celebrates teachers’ life-changing contributions and gives them public acknowledgement along with much-needed freedom to devote to their own writing.
Two 2022 Jack Hazard Fellows remark on their transformative experience:
“I have taken long breaks [from my book] during stressful times where there was no room in my head to contemplate writing. Before I finally settled on my current draft, I had countless false starts. And many times, I have had to fight the voice in my head telling me that I am not up to the challenge of writing this novel. But with the support of the Jack Hazard Fellowship, I was finally able to complete a draft of the novel.”
—Molly Montgomery, Emeryville High School, Emeryville, CA
“What a gift this fellowship has been – a reminder of what time can offer, what practice can mean…the rhythms and demands of school just don’t permit this kind of space and time on a regular basis. But the roots are planted, the memory awakened, and a commitment reborn: there is meaning in this work, in this kind of presence, and a fellowship like this restores some of what older teacher/writers like me can lose sight of in the busy-ness of the world.”
—Andy Spear, Head Royce School, Oakland, CA
Reflections on the Jack Hazard Fellowship from two leading authors:
What a wonderful, creative fellowship this is, rewarding those whose dedication often goes unsung, so that they might enrich not only their own work, but the gifts they pass along.
—Daniel Mason, author of A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth; 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient
The Jack Hazard Fellowship is a brilliant way to ensure that our teachers who are also writers have the time and freedom to devote to the art that sustains them.
—Lauren Groff, author of Matrix; 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient
NewLit, a not-for-profit created in 2016, fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances lives of readers, writers, educators, and high school and college students in diverse communities in California and the nation. Our vision is to drive social change, unleash artistic power, and lift up a literate, democratic society.
In addition to Jack Hazard Summer Fellowships, NewLit offers the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, an annual national award of $50,000 for mid-career fiction writers of consequence. In Spring 2023, the seventh such recipient will be named.
The Project serves high school-age writers via Simpson Writing Workshops at no cost, led by Simpson Fellows, UC Berkeley graduate student creative writing instructors; in Spring 2023 workshops are expected to take place at Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. Alameda County, Northgate High School, and elsewhere.
NewLit curates a nationally distributed annual anthology of Project-related artists, including Prize winners and finalists along with younger writers appearing in print for the first time: Simpsonistas:Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 4 (Rare Bird) launched in Fall 2022.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, (510) 919-0970
diane@newliteraryproject.org
https://www.newliteraryproject.org/