Alumna Robin Beth Schaer '05 Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

By
Nicole Saldarriaga
February 10, 2021

Recently the National Endowment for the Arts announced the recipients of its 2021 Creative Writing Fellowships, naming among them alumna Robin Beth Schaer '05. The fellowships, which are in poetry this year, award $25,000 to each of 35 total fellows who were chosen for the distinction through an anonymous process which focused solely on the artistic qualities of their writing samples. Schaer was selected for the fellowship from over 1,600 applicants to this highly competitive program that seeks to support artists by allowing them to set aside time and energy for their art. In response to the news, Schaer said that she is "really thrilled and buoyed by the award." 

The Creative Writing Fellowships, which have been awarded by the NEA since 1967, have supported close to 4,000 creative writers and awarded over $56 million in grant money. Recipients of the fellowship have gone on to receive prestigious awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

According to Amy Stolls, Director of Literary Arts at the Arts Endowment, "these fellowships often provide writers with crucial support and encouragement, and in return our nation is enriched by their artistic contributions in the years to come."

Schaer's debut collection of poetry, Shipbreaking (Anhinga, 2015) charts an intimate and surreal journey "where seas rise, mastodons roam, aeronauts float overhead, bodies electrify, and a child is born as a ship wrecks in a hurricane." The poetry is informed by consultations with and references to the exceedingly real: scientists, fossils, maps, facts, and philosophers—resulting in a collection that draws parallels between the intimately human and the larger-scale picture of natural disasters outside of human control. Publishers Weekly called the book "eerily great at linking concerns of the past—even those of prehistory—with living urgencies, combining a fantastic lyricism with near-scientific precision." Alumna and US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith '97 said of the book, "Shipbreaking's ultra-taut lines urge departure, a kind of experiential upsweep. And they keen just as convincingly toward the steady grounding of land, home, and the embrace of the beloved as they do toward the wind-racked surface and unknowable depths of the sea." Read more of Schaer's poetry here

Robin Beth Schaer's poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, Bomb Magazine, Paris Review, and Guernica, among others. Her honors include a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds degrees from Colgate University and Columbia University. Born and raised in New York, she now lives in Ohio with her husband, the writer Anthony Tognazzini, and their son. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College.