Literary Awards and Fellowships
The Lannan Literary Awards and Fellowships were established in 1989 to honor both established and emerging writers whose work is of exceptional quality. Over the last 20 years, Lannan Foundation, through its Awards and Fellowships program, has awarded 173 writers and poets more than $13 million.. The awards recognize writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature. The fellowships recognize writers of distinctive literary merit who demonstrate potential for continued outstanding work.
Candidates for the awards and fellowships are recommended to the Foundation by a network of writers, literary scholars, publishers, and editors. Nominators are geographically dispersed and serve anonymously. The final determination of recipients is made by the Foundation’s literary committee.
Through its Literary Awards and Fellowships program, the Foundation hopes to stimulate the creation of literature written originally in the English language and to develop a wider audience for contemporary prose and poetry. Additional Foundation literary activities include Grants to nonprofit organizations including small, nonprofit presses with an emphasis on works in translation, and the Lannan Writing Residency in Marfa, Texas. The Foundation also produces a literary reading series, Readings & Conversations in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Applications and nominations for literary awards or fellowships will not be accepted.
Michael McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. His books include Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill (Truman State University Press, 2010), and a co-translation (with Mikaela Grassl) of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer Books, 2010). His next collection of poems, The Sequence of the Night, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. McGriff’s poetry and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, Slate, The Believer, Field, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and Poetry, among other publications. His awards include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, The Balcones Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship, The Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, a Stegner Fellowship, and a James A. Michener Fellowship. McGriff is a former Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and will be the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Wichita State University during the spring of 2011. He is the co-founder and co-editor (with Carl Adamshick) of Tavern Books, an independent publisher of poetry in translation. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
C. E. Morgan studied English and voice at Berea College, KY, and holds an M.A. in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. She is currently living in Virginia and at work on her second novel. Her first novel, All the Living, (2009), won the Weatherford Award as the outstanding fiction work depicting Appalachia and was a finalist for the