Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing

To enhance our strong program in creative writing, the Department of English established the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing.

The annual fellowship is designed to support writers completing their first books. It provides a generous stipend, office space, and an intellectual community for the recipients, who spend the academic year at Colgate. In return, each fellow teaches a creative-writing workshop each semester and gives a public reading of his or her work.

For additional information about the fellowship and the application process, please contact us at englishdept@colgate.edu or 315-228-7262.

Fellows in 2012-2013

Amy Butcher

Amy Butcher is a graduate of Gettysburg College and the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her essays and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Indiana Review, The Colorado Review, Brevity, The Rumpus, and Hobart, among others, and she is a recent recipient of a Stanley Grant for International Research. She is the managing editor of Defunct and a former intern for the Gettysburg Review, and is currently at work on a book-length essay that meditates on the historic battlefield town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and a murder that recently occurred there. The book considers the nature of friendship and the parameters inherent in the relationships we seek.

Chinelo Okparanta

Chinelo received her BS from Penn State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The Coffin Factory, Conjunctions, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She has taught at the University of Iowa, where she served as a Dean's Fellow and subsequently as the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer for Fiction. Her short story collection will be published in 2013, followed shortly by her debut novel, tentatively entitled Under The Udara Trees.

Fellows in 2011-2012

Molly Beer

Molly Beer is a Creative Writing Fellow

Molly Beer is a graduate of Duke University, the Bread Loaf School of English, and the University of New Mexico MFA program, where she served as nonfiction editor for Blue Mesa Review. In addition to the American Southwest, she has lived in El Salvador, Ecuador, and Mexico, and her subsequent essays grapple with the politics of place. Her most recent work appears in Salon, Guernica, Glimpse, Copper Nickel, and Room Magazine, and she is co-author of Singing Out, an oral history published by Oxford University Press (2010).

George David Clark

george-david-clark

George David Clark's honors include a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia and the Provost's Doctoral Fellowship at Texas Tech. His poems appear in such journals as The Cimarron Review, The North American Review, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere, and can be found reprinted online at Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. He also serves as editor of the journal, 32 Poems.

Fellows 2010-2011

Jasmine Bailey

Jasmine_Bailey_opt Jasmine Bailey graduated from Colgate in 2005 and the University of Virginia MFA program in 2010. There, she worked as poetry editor for the semi-annual literary journal, Meridian. Her chapbook of poems, Sleep and What Precedes It, won the Longleaf Press 2009 Chapbook Prize and her book-length collection of poetry, Alexandria, will be published by Carnegie Mellon. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the minnesota review, Poet Lore, 32 Poems, The Carolina Quarterly, The Portland Review, and the Birmingham Poetry Review, among others.

Marjorie Celona

Marjorie Celona studied writing at the University of Victoria and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and recipient of the Ailene Barger Barnes Prize for Excellence in the Short Story. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading (2008), Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, Best Canadian Stories (2007, 2010, 2012), The Fiddlehead, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. In May, she will be writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, where she plans to finish her novel.

Fellows 2009-2010

Sarah Beth Childers

Sarah finds much of her writing inspiration in the creeks, hills, and train tracks around where she grew up in Huntington, West Virginia. She has a bachelor of arts in history from Marshall University and a master of fine arts in creative nonfiction from West Virginia University. She has taught writing at West Virginia University and medieval literature and history at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program. Her work has appeared in SNReview and Paddlefish, and her short story “Red Ribbon” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009

Anthony Eleftherion

Anthony Eleftherion’s stories have appeared in the Madison Review and Epoch. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Rutgers University and a master of fine arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Maytag fellow. A short film he co-wrote received a student academy award, the HBO short film award, the grand jury awards at South by Southwest and Palm Springs Film Festivals, and was an official selection of the Sundance film festival. He is completing a collection of stories about Brooklyn, NY.