English's Dawn Lundy Martin Awarded Creative Writing Fellowship From National Endowment for the Arts

Dawn Lundy Martin, a professor in the Department of English and co-director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, has been awarded a 2018 Creative Writing Fellowship in nonfiction from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Martin is one of only 36 literary professionals awarded this fellowship for 2018.

The NEA’s most direct investment in American creativity, the fellowship program is designed to encourage ascending writers to produce new works of literature. It seeks to give fellows the means, space, and time to develop individual projects. Martin will use the award to write a collection of linked autobiographical essays. These essays will serve as a memoir of Martin’s experiences growing up in a working-class Black community in Hartford, Connecticut, and being bussed to the affluent, predominantly Caucasian suburb of Glastonbury for school. The memoir will highlight the effects of these divergent race and class experiences.