Nine Jack Hazard Fellowship Winners Announced for 2022
Download the full press release.
Oakland, California – March 30, 2022 – The New Literary Project (NewLit) has announced nine California high school teachers as the first recipients of its Jack Hazard Fellowships – an inventive, groundbreaking program that awards $5,000 Summer 2022 Fellowships to high school teachers who are pursuing creative writing projects. For 2023 and beyond, NewLit plans to open the program to applications from writers who teach high school anywhere in the United States.
“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,” remembers Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, Florida, & Matrix; 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist. “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.”
“I remember teaching high school,” says Joseph Di Prisco, founding board chair of the New Literary Project and a onetime high school teacher who has published 14 books, including poetry, memoirs, and novels. “Teenagers can wear their feelings on their sleeves. Sometimes they wear them on your sleeve. There are days when each class feels like a telenovela. It’s high stakes, slipping seamlessly between high jinx and solemnity. And that makes high school such an alternately fascinating, stressful, jubilant, charged, invigorating home base—acutely so for a writer who teaches. As a famous poet, John Ciardi, once said, going through high school provides enough material for a lifetime of poems. That’s true for teachers as well. New Literary Project is pleased and honored that our Jack Hazard Fellows will use their summers to explore their calling, art and craft, and that they will return in the fall to their schools with new stories that yearn to be told.”
The 2022 Jack Hazard Fellows are:
Kevin Allardice
Albany High School, Albany, CA
But They Filmed the Movie Somewhere Else: A Novel
Julie T. Anderson
Honorary Fellow, The College Preparatory School, Oakland, CA
Armando Batista
Pacific Ridge School, Carlsbad, CA
American Diaspora: A Dominicanish Travelog
Adam O. Davis
The Bishop's School, La Jolla, CA
The Everlasting Goddamned Winter
Sheila Madary
St. Mary's High School, Stockton, CA
Molly Montgomery
Emery High School, Emeryville, CA
Children of the Orchard
Mehnaz Sahibzada
New Roads School, Santa Monica, CA
Jaani
Tori Sciacca
Richmond High School, Richmond, CA
Soul Language: Stories of Soul Connections and Love
Andy Spear
Head-Royce School, Oakland, CA
I Think It's a Lizard
Jack Hazard Fellowships 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. With these fellowships, the New Literary Project celebrates teachers’ life-changing contributions and gives them public acknowledgement along with much-needed freedom to devote to their own writing.
Daniel Mason, author of The Winter Soldier and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth; 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient, observes: “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.”
The New Literary Project, a nonprofit created in 2016, is also home of: The Joyce Carol Oates Prize (annual $50,000 award to a mid-career author); Simpson Writing Workshops (offered free to Bay Area younger writers); Simpson Fellows (creative writing instructors from the UC Berkeley English Department); Simpsonistas: Tales from the New Literary Project (internationally distributed annual anthology of work by NewLit-related authors, including younger writers).
For more information, contact Diane Del Signore
510.919.0970 or diane@newliteraryproject.org
For media inquiries, contact Scott Busby at The Busby Group
310.600.7645 or scott@thebusbygroup.com