2023 Jack Hazard Fellows Announced
OAKLAND, CA, March 28, 2023—New Literary Project (NewLit) has announced that fourteen creative writers who teach high school are recipients of Jack Hazard Fellowships – an innovative, groundbreaking initiative that awards $5,000 Summer Fellowships to support the artistic endeavors of high school teachers from around the country.
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 full-throated commitment to support writers across generations, communities, and divides. The financial award intends to enable these creative writers who teach to concentrate freely on their writing for a summer. .
A tremendous number of eminently worthy applicants came from thirty-five states, writers who teach at hundreds of public, private, charter, and independent schools throughout the nation—Hawaii to Florida, Los Angeles to Boston, Chicago to New York City. Last year, nine Jack Hazards ’22 were honored. This year, NewLit honors as Jack Hazards ’23 these fourteen exceptionally wonderful writers who teach:
William Archila
STEAM Virtual Academy (Los Angeles, CA)
No One's Watching: a memoir out of El Salvador
Victoria María Castells
Miami Arts Charter School (Miami, FL)
Tired as We Are: A Novel
Leticia Del Toro
Campolindo High School (Moraga, CA)
Return to Azucena : A Novel
Elizabeth DiNuzzo
The Albany Academies (Albany, NY)
The Foreverness: A Memoir
t’ai freedom ford
Benjamin Banneker Academy (Brooklyn, NY)
The Surge: A Novel
Emily Y. Harnett
The Haverford School (Haverford, PA)
The Other Side of Forgetting: Essays
Jeff Kass
Pioneer High School (Ann Arbor, MI)
Forgotten Man: A Novel
Ariana Kelly
Boston University Academy (Boston, MA)
Lay Me Down Like a Stone: A Memoir
Kate McQuade
Phillips Academy (Andover, MA)
Hollow Arts: A Novel
Tyson Morgan
Crystal Springs Uplands School (Hillsborough, CA)
The Immaculate: A Novel
Shareen K. Murayama
Henry J. Kaiser High School (Honolulu, HI)
How to Kill a Factory Girl & Baabaa and Jiji Series: Novellas
Sahar Mustafah
Homewood-Flossmoor High School (Chicago, IL)
The Tree of Life & Other Stories
Ky-Phong Tran
Long Beach Renaissance High School for the Arts (Long Beach, CA)
A Thing Called Exodus: Short Stories
Vernon Clifford Wilson
Horace Mann School (Bronx, NY)
True History of the Inner City: A Novel
“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, and Matrix; 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist. “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, founder and board chair of New Literary Project and a onetime high school teacher who has published 14 books, including poetry, memoirs, and novels. “New Literary Project is pleased and honored that our Jack Hazard Fellows will use their summers to explore their calling, art and craft. For writers who teach that may well be what summer is for. Then, come fall, they will return to their schools with new stories of their own, yearning to be told.”
Daniel Mason, author of The Winter Soldier and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth; 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient, observes: “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.”
Applications for 2024 Jack Hazard Fellowships will be available in Fall 2023. Consult the website for updates, details, and deadlines.
https://www.newliteraryproject.org/jack-hazard-fellowship
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, New Literary Project celebrates teachers’ life-changing contributions and gives them public acknowledgement along with much-needed freedom to devote to their own writing.
New Literary Project, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit public benefit corporation, was established in 2016, through an innovative private/public marquee partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, collaborating with visionary community leaders and altruistic companies and family foundations. Cal has long been the foremost English Department in the world at the leading public university in the nation.
The Project drives social change by unleashing artistic power in order to lift up a literate, democratic society. It fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances the lives of readers, writers, educators, librarians, and students across generations and in diverse communities in California and the nation. Its mantra proceeds from the counsel of Joyce Carol Oates: “Write your heart out.”
NewLit annually offers the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, $50,000 to a mid-career author of fiction. In April 2023, the seventh award winner is expected to be named. Previous Prize Recipients: T. Geronimo Johnson, Anthony Marra, Laila Lalami, Daniel Mason, Danielle Evans, and Lauren Groff.
As with every year of its existence, NewLit offers high-school age writers workshops at no cost this spring to younger aspiring writers with previously insufficient access to arts education.
Simpson Fellows, creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department, will lead five workshops for teenagers at Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. of Alameda County (2), Cal Prep, and Northgate High School
Starn Fellows, creative writers from the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program, will lead two workshops at Emery High School, Emeryville, California.
In addition, the Project curates an internationally distributed annual anthology of Project-related artists, including Prize finalists and Joyce Carol Oates as well as younger writers published for the first time: Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 4, appeared in Fall 2022 (Rare Bird). Alongside a host of distinguished authors appear younger previously unpublished writers from NewLit workshops.
Jack Hazard Fellowships are sustained by the generosity of System Property Development Company. Over 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.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, (510) 919-0970
