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Senior Lecturer Matthew Olzmann Receives NEA Fellowship

Matthew Olzmann, a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing has received a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  • Matthew Olzmann in gray scale against a wood exterior. He wears glasses and his chin is titled up.

    Olzmann is the author of the collections Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design.

On February 4th, 2021, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Matthew Olzmann is one of 35 writers who will receive an FY 2021 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. This year's fellowships are in poetry and enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Fellows are selected through a highly-competitive, anonymous process and are judged on the basis of artistic excellence of the work sample they provided. Olzmann was selected from 1,601 eligible applicants. The full list of FY 2021 Creative Writing Fellows is available here.

"The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support these 35 talented poets through Creative Writing Fellowships," said Amy Stolls, director of literary arts at the Arts Endowment. "These fellowships often provide writers with crucial support and encouragement, and in return our nation is enriched by their artistic contributions in the years to come."

 

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design. His third book, Constellation Route, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in January 2022. A recipient of fellowships from the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American Writers, MacDowell, and the Kresge Arts Foundation, Olzmann's work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize XLV, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing.

Since 1967, the Arts Endowment has awarded more than 3,600 Creative Writing Fellowships totaling over $56 million. Many American recipients of the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were recipients of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships early in their careers.

Visit arts.gov to browse bios, artist statements, and writing excerpts from a sample of past Creative Writing Fellows.