Applications Open for Jack Hazard Fellowships: $5,000 Summer Awards to Creative Writers Teaching High School
November 13, 2024
OAKLAND, CA— New Literary Project will accept applications for annual Jack Hazard Summer Fellowships starting on November 15, 2024. For Summer 2025, fellowships of $5,000 will again be awarded to creative writers who are full-time educators teaching in accredited high schools in the United States. Applications close on January 3, 2025, 11:59 PM Eastern.
Up to fifteen 2025 Jack Hazard Recipients are expected to be announced in Spring 2025. Since 2022, NewLit has awarded thirty-four $5,000 fellowships to writers who teach in eighteen states around the country, from Hawaii to Florida, New York to California, Illinois to Texas, North Carolina to Massachusetts. Applications are welcome nationwide.
Consult the website for additional details and application.
Jack Hazard Fellowships are sustained by the generous support of System Property, in memory of Mr. Jack Hazard, who founded the company one hundred years ago.
Applicant eligibility and information:
Applicants must be writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir.
Applicants commit to concentrating upon their creative writing during Summer 2025.
Applicants have taught full-time for at least three years.
Applicants are full-time, current instructors (in any department or division, not just English) in an accredited high school (grades 9–12, teaching in the 2024–25 academic year).
Applicants will return to full-time teaching in Fall 2025.
Applicants submit a writing sample along with other related support material requested.
Jack Hazard Fellowships honor, reward, and incentivize talented, dedicated writers who teach in secondary schools. These writers-who-teach inspire their students, high schools, and communities, and provide a professional model of writers creating art in these challenging times. With these fellowships, NewLit celebrates teachers’ life-changing contributions and gives them public acknowledgement along with much-needed freedom to devote to their own writing.
Former Jack Hazard Fellows remarked on their transformative experience:
“The Jack Hazard Fellowship has changed me and my writing life profoundly, in ways both big and small, and in ways I most likely will not realize for years to come. I’ve tried my best to articulate and categorize the support it has given me, but I know that its lasting influence is yet to be determined.”
—Ky-Phong Tran, Long Beach Renaissance High School for the Arts, Long Beach, CA
“To have writers at New Literary Project say we are moved and delighted by your writing, and to receive a fellowship that understands and celebrates my role as a teacher, that recognizes the incredible responsibility and demand of this profession–I have rarely felt so seen for the work I’m doing. Thank you
for inviting me into a community that is creating so many innovative and compassionate opportunities for all kinds of writers.”
—Heather Tone, St. Andrew's Episcopal Upper School, Austin, TX
“The Jack Hazard Fellowship has given me the opportunity to wrestle with my own ideas, tease out what’s most important, and make the process feel more wondrous and satisfying. Thanks so much for giving all of the fellows this year so much purpose. In the best of ways, I feel like the work has only just started!"
—Victoria María Castells, Miami Arts Charter School, Miami, FL
“Winning the Jack Hazard Fellowship affirmed several things for me. Foremost, my writing matters and is more than a passionate pursuit, but just as valid as the profession of teaching. Secondly, traveling for research proves my writing doesn't have to be an isolated experience. Beyond books, Google, interviews, and my own lived experiences, I was craving a more intimate connection to the cultural art centering my short story collection: tatreez تطريز. (Palestinian embroidery).”
—Sahar Mustafah, Homewood-Flossmoor High School, Flossmoor, IL
Leading authors reflected on 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.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Matrix; 2022 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!”
—Manuel Muñoz, MacArthur Foundation Fellow; author of The Consequences; 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient
About New Literary Project
New Literary Project is a not-for-profit created in 2015 with a vision to drive social change, unleash artistic power, and lift up a literate, democratic society. We do that through arts education, fostering new literature, supporting authors, and enhancing the lives of readers, writers, educators, and high school and college students in neglected, undervalued, overlooked communities in California and the nation.
In addition to Jack Hazard Summer Fellowships, NewLit offers the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, an annual national award of $50,000 for mid-career fiction writers of consequence, promise, and distinction. In Spring 2025, the ninth such recipient will be named.
By Spring 2025, the Project will have taught over a thousand high school-age writers at no cost via Bonnie Bonetti Bell Workshops and Iris Starn Workshops, led by creative writing instructors from the UC Berkeley English Department and Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Creative Writing Department. In Spring 2025, more than ten workshops are expected to take place at Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. of Alameda County, and elsewhere.
NewLit curates a nationally distributed annual anthology of Project-related artists, including Prize winners and finalists along with younger writers published for the first time; Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 6 (Rare Bird) launched in Fall 2024.
Jack Hazard Fellowships are sustained by the generosity of System Property Development. One hundred years ago, Mr. Hazard founded the company that has today become System Property Development. 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.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, (510) 919-0970
diane@newliteraryproject.org
https://www.newliteraryproject.org/