New Literary Project Announces 2026 Jack Hazard Fellows: Creative Writers Who Teach High School Around the Country
OAKLAND, CA, April 9, 2026—New Literary Project (NewLit) has announced that seven creative writers who teach high school are receiving 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 39 states plus the District of Columbia. 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)
“My mother was a high school teacher while I was growing up, as well as being a talented painter, but during the school year she was so passionate about teaching that she simply didn't have any time to dedicate to her art,” remembers Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Winds, Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix; 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist. “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.”
“I remember teaching high school,” says Joseph Di Prisco, founder and board chair of New Literary Project and a onetime high school teacher who has published books of poetry, memoirs, and novels. “New Literary Project is pleased and honored that our Jack Hazard Fellows will use their summers to explore their calling, art and craft. For writers who teach that may well be what summer is for. Then, come fall, they will return to their schools with new stories of their own, yearning to be told.”
Daniel Mason, author of The North Woods, The Winter Soldier, and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth; 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient, observes: “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.”
Applications for 2027Jack Hazard Fellowships will be available in Fall 2026.
Consult the website for updates, details, and deadlines.
Jack Hazard Fellowships 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, New Literary Project celebrates teachers’ life-changing contributions and gives them public acknowledgement along with much-needed freedom to devote to their own writing.
New Literary Project, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation, was established in 2015, through an innovative private/public marquee partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, collaborating with visionary community leaders and altruistic companies and family foundations. Cal has long been the foremost English Department in the world at the leading public university in the nation.
The Project drives social change by unleashing artistic power in order to lift up a literate, democratic society. It fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances the lives of readers, writers, educators, librarians, and students across generations and in diverse communities in California and the nation. Its mantra proceeds from the counsel of Joyce Carol Oates: “Write your heart out.”
NewLit annually offers the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, $50,000 to a mid-career author of fiction. In Spring 2026, the eleventh award winner is expected to be named. Previous Prize Recipients: T. Geronimo Johnson, Anthony Marra, Laila Lalami, Daniel Mason, Danielle Evans, Lauren Groff, Manuel Muñoz, Ben Fountain, Jennine Capó Crucet, and Willy Vlautin. Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipients take up brief residency in the Fall during the NewLit Roadshow at Cal and in the Bay Area, where they teach, give readings, and make public appearances.
As with every year of its existence, NewLit offers creative writing workshops at no cost to high school-age writers from neglected, overlooked, undervalued communities, teenagers with previously insufficient access to arts education.
Bonnie Bonetti-Bell Fellows, creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department, and Iris Starn Fellows, creative writers from the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program, are leading creative writing workshops in the Bay Area in 2026, at sites such as Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. Alameda County, Hope Solutions, Concord High School, Northgate High School, and elsewhere.
In addition, the Project curates an internationally distributed annual anthology of Project-related artists, including Prize winners and Joyce Carol Oates as well as younger writers published for the first time: Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 7, appeared in Fall 2025 (Rare Bird). Alongside a host of distinguished authors appear younger previously unpublished writers from NewLit workshops as well as Jack Hazard Fellows.
Jack Hazard Fellowships are sustained by the generosity of System Property as well as other generous donors. Over one hundred years ago, Mr. Hazard founded the company that has today become System Property. He was a larger-than-life, mostly self-educated, and deeply curious man who admired education and educators, someone who loved to hear and tell a good story. As a charismatic, visionary entrepreneur and generous philanthropist, he had a profound, unforgettable impact that resonates to this day. New Literary Project is honored and humbled to be associated with his legacy.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director