2024 Jack Hazard Fellows Announced by New Literary Project
OAKLAND, CA, March 5, 2024— New Literary Project (NewLit) has announced that ten creative writers who teach high school are recipients of 2024 Jack Hazard Fellowships. The Jack Hazard Fellowship is a groundbreaking initiative that awards $5,000 of support during the summer to work on writing projects for select high school teachers from around the United States.
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.
This year, NewLit honors these 2024 Jack Hazard Fellows for exceptional writing accomplishment and promise:
Cyd A. Apellido
The Fletcher School (Charlotte, NC)
Beneath Her Shadow (a novel)
Sean Gleason
Rudsdale High School (Oakland, CA)
On The Bricks
Mohammad Hakima
The International High School for Health Sciences (Queens, NY)
A Leak in the Roof (a memoir/essays)
Monica Judge
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (Bethesda, MD)
Elemental (an essay collection)
Natalie Mislang Mann
Vaughn International Studies Academy, VISA High School (Pacoima, CA)
Roots of a Banyan Tree (a memoir)
Chad Marsh
Lake Washington High School (Kirkland, WA)
The Lighter Graveyard; Fairfield (a novel)
Sarah Schiff
The Paideia School (Atlanta, GA)
This Accidental World (a novel)
Heather Tone
St. Andrew's Episcopal Upper School (Austin, TX)
This Moment Moves Us Forward
Alonzo Vareen
Sidwell Friends School (Washington, DC)
The Mean Girls of Morehouse (a novel)
Adam White
St. Sebastian's School (Needham, MA)
The Island Rule (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 The Vaster Winds, 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 books of 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 North Woods, 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 2025 Jack Hazard Fellowships will be available in Fall 2024. 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 corporation, was established in 2015, 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 2024, the eighth award winner is expected to be named. Previous Prize Recipients: T. Geronimo Johnson, Anthony Marra, Laila Lalami, Daniel Mason, Danielle Evans, Lauren Groff, and Manuel Muñoz. Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipients take up brief residency in the Fall at Cal and in the Bay Area, where they teach, give readings, and make public appearances.
As with every year of its existence, NewLit offers creative writing workshops at no cost to high school-age writers from neglected, overlooked, undervalued communities, teenagers with previously insufficient access to arts education.
Bonnie Bonetti-Bell Fellows, creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department, and Iris Starn Fellows, creative writers from the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program, will lead nine creative writing workshops in the Bay Area in 2024, at sites such as Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. Alameda County, Concord High School, Northgate High School, and elsewhere.
In addition, the Project curates an internationally distributed annual anthology of Project-related artists, including Prize winners and Joyce Carol Oates as well as younger writers published for the first time: Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 5, appeared in Fall 2023 (Rare Bird). Alongside a host of distinguished authors appear younger previously unpublished writers from NewLit workshops as well as Jack Hazard Fellows.
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