2025 Jack Hazard Fellows

Jack Hazard Fellows are writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir. The $5,000 fellowship is awarded in support of an ongoing project in one of these genres. They are full-time, current instructors in an accredited high school (grades 9-12)—and contracted to return to their schools in fall 2025. The goal is to 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.

Since 2022, we have awarded thirty-eight Jack Hazard Fellowships to applicants from Hawaii to Florida, Los Angeles to Boston, Chicago to New York City. In 2025, hundreds of talented, worthy writers who teach high school applied from thirty-six states, and we sincerely thank all who applied. Of the numerous sterling candidates in a highly competitive field who submitted marvelous work we chose five 2025 Jack Hazard Fellows from states around the nation.

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 2025
Jack Hazard Fellows

Jack Hazard Fellows are writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir. They are full-time, current instructors in an accredited high school (grades 9-12, teaching in this 2024-25 academic year)—and contracted to return to their schools in fall 2025.

  • Woodward Academy
    College Park, GA

    Satie in Wyoming

    A life-long Midwesterner who grew up in small towns and graduated from Oberlin College, Dallas Crow now finds himself, much to his surprise, navigating the mild winters, sultry summers, and relentless traffic of North Central Georgia, where he is well into his third decade of teaching high school English. When he is not at school, you can usually find him reading, writing, making photographs, or fly fishing. His poems, stories, and nonfiction pieces (essays, journalism, and criticism) have appeared in publications around the country, and he is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Troutwatching (Finishing Line Press, 2025) and Small, Imperfect Paradise (Parallel Press, 2013). The father of two grown sons, he lives on the Upper West Side of Atlanta with his sweetheart and teaches at Woodward Academy.

 

  • The Bush School
    Seattle, WA

    The Girl is Going to Live

    Molly Olguín is a queer writer, educator, and monster aficionado. Her collection The Sea Gives Up the Dead was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado for the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. She has stories in magazines like Quarterly West and The Normal School. She was the recipient of the Loft Mentor Series Fellowship in 2019. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington.

 
 
 
 

  • St. Paul Academy and Summit School
    St. Paul, MN

    What Debt Demands

    Kristin Collier's debut nonfiction book What Debt Demands is forthcoming with Grand Central Publishing. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA program and has been a recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board funding and a Yaddo artist residency. Her writing has been published with Fourth Genre and Longreads and was recently anthologized in Coffee House Press’s American Precariat. She's taught in a variety of educational contexts — public middle schools and high schools across the country, within the carceral system, at the university level, and at charter schools — and currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature courses at St. Paul Academy and Summit School, where she's been working for the last seven years.

 

  • Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep Academy
    Chicago, IL

    The Witch

    Will Ejzak is a high school English teacher in Chicago. His writing has appeared in North American Review, Washington Square Review, and Cimarron Review, among others. His short story collections have been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize. In 2022, he was selected as a finalist for the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is currently enrolled in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago.

 

  • Punahou School
    Honolulu, HI

    Fatherland

    Anjoli Roy (she/her) is a creative writer and high school English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Her ancestors are from India, Germany, England, and Ireland. Born and raised in Pasadena, California, Anjoli has a BA in individualized study from NYU and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a VONA/Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation fellow. Anjoli is the author of the chapbook, Enter the Navel: For the Love of Creative Nonfiction (The Operating System, 2020). Her writing has appeared in ANMLY, The Asian American Literary Review, Hoʻolana, Hippocampus, Longreads, Menagerie, The Pinch, Poem-a-Day, River Teeth, Short Reads, and other places. Anjoli is PhDJ for “It’s Lit,” a literature-and-music podcast she cohosts with Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng and has featured more than 100 writers to date.

 
 

“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 Winner

“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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