John Grammer Fellowship

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route (2022), as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (2013), which won a Kundiman Poetry Prize, and Contradictions in the Design (2016), described as “that rare thing that embraces complication while, at every turn, filling us with wonder,” by C. Dale Young. Olzmann is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. With Ross White, Olzmann edited Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series (2012). He is the poetry editor of the Collagist.

Olzmann earned his BA from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.

Shruti Swamy is the author of the award-winning, short story collection A House Is a Body (Algonquin Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. Kiese Laymon, himself a past Grammer Fellow, has said that “Shruti Swamy’s A House Is a Body will not simply be talked about as one of the greatest short story collections of the 2020s; it will change the way that all stories—short and long—are told, written and consumed. There is nothing, no emotion, nor tiny morsel of memory, no touch, that this book does not take seriously. Yet, A House Is a Body might be the most fun I’ve ever had in a short story collection.” Shruti’s debut novel, The Archer (Algonquin Books, 2021), has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Swamy’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, the Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. In 2012, she was Vassar College’s 50th W.K. Rose Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook. She has won two O. Henry Awards, was a recipient of a 2018 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and was a 2017–2018 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She is a Kundiman fiction fellow and in 2022 was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

The Washington Post praised Edinburgh (2001) as “A coming-of-age tale in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death.” People magazine described The Queen of the Night (2016) as a “Sweeping, richly detailed” novel. NPR called it “Sprawling, soaring, bawdy, and plotted like a fine embroidery.” It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection and was named a best book of the year by Esquire, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Buzzfeed, and NPR. Of Chee’s career-spanning essay collection, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel (2018), author and critic Garth Greenwell says, “I'm astonished by the wisdom of these essays, and how beautiful they are. A riveting account of activism and artistry, as well as a profound exploration of the intersections of identities and experiences that build up this novelist's composite eye. Alexander Chee is brilliant and brave in equal measure, and has written an essential book about how to survive as an artist in America today.” 

(Photo by Robert Gill.)

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the author of the genre-bending novel, Long Division and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on several new projects, including the long poem, Good God, the horror comedy, And So On, the children’s book, City Summer, Country Summer and the film Heavy: An American Memoir. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents, more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing.

Jessica is the author of the poetry collections of Take Me With You, Wherever You're Going (2019), a memoir-in-poems focusing on coming of age in Florida and the complexities and joys of early marriage between Jacobs and her wife, fellow poet Nickole Brown, and Pelvis with Distance (2015), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, which won the New Mexico Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in Orion, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica, and The Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and serves as the associate editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, in Asheville, North Carolina with her dogs.

Lucy Alibar has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA award, and the Scripter Award for the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. The film was an adaptation written with Benh Zeitlin based on Lucy's play, Juicy and Delicious. Beasts of the Southern Wild also earned the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Film Festival Camera D’Or. Lucy is also the winner of the Ray Bradbury Nebula Award, the Humanitas Prize, and the Nantucket Film Festival New Voices in Screenwriting Award. Lucy’s writing has been published in Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Wall Street Journal and her plays have been seen at Sundance Theatre Lab, National Theatre Studio, Joe’s Pub, Ojai, Berkeley Rep, and Williamstown. Lucy is also a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, a Sundance Screenwriting Fellow, associate editor at Oxford American magazine, and advocate for girls in the arts.

Stephanie Pruitt is a poet and social practice artist who has taught at Vanderbilt University, the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, and as a visiting artist in over one hundred K-­12 and community settings. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Essence Magazine named her one of their “40 Favorite Poets.” Stephanie serves as a Commissioner for Metro Arts and on the board of directors for the Arts & Business Council. She prefers flip flops over stilettos, pancakes over waffles, and the toilet paper is always over, not under. When at her Nashville home, the mother of Nia and wife of Al can often be found with an 70lb dog in her lap. The TEDx speaker is the founder of NoStarvingArtist(dot)me and is committed to helping creators make a LIFE and LIVING with their art.