Jack Hazard Fellowships
Learn more about what it means to be a Jack Hazard Fellow as a creative writer and a high school teacher. View Jack Hazards of LA: The Documentary.
Jack Hazard Fellowship
Jack Hazard Fellows are fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir writers who teach full time in an accredited high school in the United States. We provide a $5,000 award that enables these creative writers who teach to focus on their writing for a summer.
History of the Fellowship
In 2021, New Literary Project launched an innovative program to inspire and equip a certain underserved and deserving community of creative writers. These are writers with a life-changing vocation and day job, teaching high school students. Invaluable and fulfilling and demanding as their teaching is, what’s also crucially important for some teachers is their own life-changing writing vocation. As anyone who remembers being a teenager can attest, it is hard if not impossible for a dedicated educator to find the time during the hectic school year for writers who teach.
Well, that may be what summer is for. And that’s where New Literary Project comes in.
In the spring of 2022, NewLit awarded nine 2022 Jack Hazard Fellowships of $5,000 apiece to an inaugural class of promising writers who taught high school in California. The results were gratifying—you can read below their testimonials. The fellows were invigorated and liberated by their Jack Hazard Fellowship, and by the time August rolled around all had made something new and consequential they were proud of. And so were we.
So for the 2023 class, we went national, eagerly opening up applications and awarded fourteen $5,000 Jack Hazard Summer 2023 Fellowships for writers teaching high school in the United States.
In the summer 2024, we awarded ten Jack Hazard Summer Fellowships. Read below and follow the links to meet the fellows and learn more about their backgrounds.
If you have been teaching and waking up early or staying up late to write, and savoring the prospect of weekends and breaks for your own work, perhaps this Jack Hazard Fellowship was created just for you. We are eager to read your application.
We will open for applications for the 2025 Jack Hazard Fellowship on November 15. Please read our Eligibility Guidelines for more information.
“So many writers started their careers as high school teachers, like Stephen King, Frank McCourt, Joanne Harris, JK Rowling, George Orwell, Dan Brown, and William Golding. The Hazard Fellowships will find and spotlight a new generation of dedicated creative writers who teach in high school.”
—Ian S. Maloney, Program Director
2024 Jack Hazard Fellowships
New Literary Project is proud to present the 2024 Jack Hazard Fellowships for Creative Writers Teaching High School.
Jack Hazard Fellows are fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir writers who teach 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 thirty-five states. 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. In 2022 and 2023, twenty-two Jack Hazards had been previously honored.
2023 Jack Hazard Fellowships
Congratulations to our Jack Hazards ’23! These NewLit Fellows are fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir writers who teach full time in an accredited high school in the United States, and they represent our full-throated commitment to support writers across the generations, communities, and divides. We provide a $5,000 award enabling these creative writers who teach to focus freely on their writing for a summer.
We received a tremendous number of worthy applicants who teach at public, private, charter, and independent schools throughout the nation—Hawaii to Florida, Los Angeles to Boston, Chicago to New York City. Last year, we honored and funded nine Jack Hazards ’22. This year, NewLit honors and funds as Jack Hazards ’23 these fourteen exceptionally wonderful writers who teach.
2022 Jack Hazard Fellowships
New Literary Project is proud to present the inaugural recipients of the 2022 Jack Hazard Fellowships for Creative Writers Teaching High School.
“Did you ever have a high school teacher who opened the door for you to love literature? In case that’s true, here’s a secret that’s not so secret. There is a good chance they were writing their own stories, stealing what time they could. Now the Jack Hazard Fellowships free them to write, because that’s what summer means for creative writers who teach high school. Jack Hazard. One more essential commitment of New Literary Project, doing what we can to inspire and equip writers across the generations to write their hearts out.”
—Joseph Di Prisco, Chair, New Literary Project
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.
“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 A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth; 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient
“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.”
Manuel Muñoz—author of The Consequences; 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient
“As a former high school teacher, I could not be more moved by the existence of the Jack Hazard Fellowships. Our teachers nurture our curiosity even before we recognize its true power. What a tremendous gift to honor them with precious time for their art and creativity!”
“The Hazard Fellowships provide a service long overdue to support these talented writers, granting them time to work unencumbered. It marks another vital effort of New Literary Project to find new writers and new stories to promote storytelling everywhere.”
David Wood—Board Member, High School Teacher
Lauren Groff—author of Matrix; 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient
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