2023 Jack Hazard Fellows

Jack Hazard ‘23 Fellows are writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir. The $5,000 fellowship is awarded in support of an ongoing project. The goal is to reward and incentivize talented writers who teach in secondary schools. These Fellows are writers who teach, and serve as inspirations to their students, high schools, and communities, and provide a professional model of writers working to find meaning and to create art in chaotic times.

New Literary Project celebrates their life-changing contributions, and gives them widespread public acknowledgement along with much-needed freedom to devote to their own writing. For many writers who teach full time, that’s what summer is for.

 

Meet the 2023
Jack Hazard Fellows

  • Miami Arts Charter School
    Miami, FL

    Tired as We Are: A Novel

    Victoria María Castells has been teaching Creative Writing to all grades at Miami Arts Charter School for the past five years. In her time as an educator, she has worked to create a literary journal, learned to teach screenwriting, and researched contests for students to submit their work. Her own work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, among other notable publications in Notre Dame Review and Tinderbox Poetry. Though her MFA from McNeese State University features a specialty in fiction, she is under contract to publish a collection of poetry this coming year.

 

  • The Albany Academies
    Albany, NY

    The Foreverness: A Memoir

    Elizabeth DiNuzzo is an educator and writer in Upstate New York. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland, and she is a former Writer-in-Residence at St. Albany School for Boys. She is currently the Sumberg Family Endowed Chair of Literature and the English Department Chair at The Albany Academies. Elizabeth lives in Saratoga Springs with her husband and three young children.

 

  • The Haverford School
    Haverford, PA

    The Other Side of Forgetting : Essays

    Emily Harnett is a dedicated teacher, and currently spends her working hours as a teacher of 10th- and 11th-grade students at an all-boys school in the Philadelphia area. Over the course of her six years as a teacher, she has also written literary criticism and reported essays for a number of publications, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Baffler, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her most recent essay for The Baffler was noted in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. Her current focus is (and has always been) curiosity—her writing and reportage have been an endless pursuit of what sparks her fascination.

 

  • Boston University Academy
    Boston, MA

    Lay Me Down Like a Stone: A Memoir

    Ariana Kelly’s writing crosses the boundaries between genres. She has concentrated on writing both poetry and creative nonfiction, publishing essays, poems, and reviews in Threepenny Review, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Hobart. Her essay “Challenger” was selected as a Notable Essay for the 2020 Best American Prize, and she is the author of a full-length book, Phone Booth (Bloomsbury). She has taught at five different schools, and finds that her students’ stories are motivations for her writing, focusing her attention on empathy and connection.

 

  • Crystal Springs Uplands School
    Hillsborough, CA

    The Immaculate: A Novel

    Tyson Morgan has been teaching English to high schoolers for eight years, but has been dedicated to educating various levels and ages of youth since 2011 (he’s previously taught at various other schools and universities in that time). His creative work has focused largely on fiction, and he currently possesses an MFA from the University of Houston, where his thesis was a finished draft of a novel. His work has been published in Narrative and Gulf Coast Magazine Online—results of his daily practice to write for an hour every day. Having grown up on military bases around the country, Tyson currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and three-year-old son.

  • Homewood-Flossmoor High School
    Flossmoor, IL

    The Tree of Life & Other Stories

    Sahar Mustafah’s first novel The Beauty of Your Face (W.W. Norton, 2020) was named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by New York Times Book Review, a Los Angeles Times United We Read selection, and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the Palestine Book Awards. Her recent publications include “Star of Bethlehem,” a short story featured in a special-themed issue of Prairie Schooner on home and displacement; and her story “Tree of Life” recently won the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, selected by Kirstin Valdez Quade. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago.

    Photo by High Key Photography

  • Horace Mann School
    Bronx, NY

    True History of the Inner City: A Novel

    Vernon Clifford Wilson has been teaching at the Horace Mann School for twelve years, and currently serves as the chair of the Upper Division English department. He obtained his MFA at CUNY Hunter College and in addition, has been published in Ploughshares and Callaloo. He spends his time educating students (who often return the favor), working on his memoir-turned-novel, and parenting his two children.

 
 

  • STEAM Virtual Academy
    Los Angeles, CA

    No One's Watching: a memoir out of El Salvador

    William Archila is the author of The Art of Exile (winner of the International Latino Book Award) and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology (winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize). He has been published in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, AGNl, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the US. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.

 

  • Campolindo High School
    Moraga, CA

    Return to Azucena : A Novel

    Leticia Del Toro has been a teacher for the past twenty-four years. She has roots in Jalisco, Mexico. Her essays, stories, and poems have been published in Anomaly, Huizache, and Zyzzyva—and in 2023, she published a poetry collection, called All We Are Told Not to Touch (Finishing Line Press). Her writing is informed by a multi-lingual perspective. Additionally, Leticia balances the parenting of two children with her career as a teacher and the creative endeavor of writing.

 

  • Benjamin Banneker Academy
    Brooklyn, NY

    The Surge: A Novel

    t’ai freedom ford has been a teacher for nineteen years—and finds that the everyday exposure to her students has been an influential part of creating real, young characters in her work. She obtained her MFA at Brooklyn College, specializing in fiction, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Center for Fiction, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has won a Lambda Literary Award for her poetry, and has placed as a finalist in several poetry competitions. Her publication history features two full-length books and a chapbook—and she simultaneously serves as an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

 

  • Pioneer High School
    Ann Arbor, MI

    Forgotten Man: A Novel

    Jeff Kass teaches Tenth Grade English and Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, MI. A former champion of numerous Poetry Slams, he’s the award-winning author of two full-length poetry collections, My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book; the thriller Takedown, the YA novel Center-Mid, and Knuckleheads, Independent Publishers Gold-medal winning Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011. He has taught poetry classes and workshops to thousands of students across the United States.

 

  • Phillips Academy
    Andover, MA

    Hollow Arts: A Novel

    Kate McQuade is an English teacher at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, MA, where she lives on campus with her family. She is the author of the story collection Tell Me Who We Were (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2019) and the novel Two Harbors (Harcourt, 2005). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous publications and have been supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Mass Cultural Council, Best American Short Stories (2020 Distinguished Story), and fellowships and scholarships from MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo.

 

  • Henry J. Kaiser High School
    Honolulu, HI

    How to Kill a Factory Girl & Baabaa and Jiji Series: Novellas

    Shareen Murayama has been a public educator in high schools for more than fifteen years, wearing multiple coordinator hats while teaching classes. Pre Covid, she ran the Po-Heads club at her school, meeting with students during lunch to share contemporary poems and write poetry. She is an MFA graduate and has published two poetry books, has undergone a paid book tour to London and Bristol, and has been featured on the Poets & Writers reading and panel for the 5 over 50 debut authors.

 

  • Long Beach Renaissance High School for the Arts
    Long Beach, CA

    A Thing Called Exodus: Short Stories

    Ky-Phong Tran is a fiction writer from Long Beach, California. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and has attended writing conferences around the country. For the past two summers, he has been a resident at the Dorland Arts Colony. He currently has about three-fourths of a promising story collection completed (the stories have been published, anthologized, and recognized in contests). He juggles his time as a writer while simultaneously focusing on being a supportive married partner, an involved father to two elementary school-age sons, and a dedicated English and Film teacher at a public arts high school.

    Photo by Stacey Wong

 
 

“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. I remember how happy she was when summer came and she finally had the chance to sit down with her oils and easel and canvas and get lost in the art she'd dreamed of making all year long. 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 Fates and Furies, Florida, & Matrix; 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist

“When I think of the people who have supported and encouraged me throughout my writing career, it is perhaps not surprising that so many of them are teachers. This is particularly true of creative writing; now when I think back of those who taught me, I realize that many of them could only have learned the delicate art of balancing innovation and creativity with hard work if they were writers themselves. 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 The Winter Soldier & A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth; 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient

Jack Hazard Fellowships are sustained by the generosity of System Property. 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. We love a good story, too, and we believe that scores of good and great stories will come to life as a result of the annual Jack Hazard Fellowships.

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