Alumni Mary Wang ’16 and Jared Jackson ’20 were recently selected as the 2021 winners of The Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship.
The Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellowship Program provides career and financial support for nine authors who are in the early stages of their careers. In 2020, the Center for Fiction established the Susan Kamil Award for Emerging Writers in honor of the late writer Susan Kamil, which offers additional support to the fellowship.
The Center for Fiction, based in Brooklyn, is a non-profit literary organization dedicated to celebrating fiction. The Center hosts panel discussions, operates an independent bookstore, and provides grants, workshops, awards, and reading groups. The one-year Emerging Writers Fellowship offers numerous opportunities for recipients, including a grant of $5000, two public readings, and meetings with editors, authors, and agents. This year’s nine recipients were selected from a pool of 530 applicants by judges Nicola DeRobertis-Theye, Sidik Fofana, and Erin Somers. The fellowship will begin on October 21, 2021.
Last year, alumnae Raluca Albu '18 and Sasha von Oldershausen '19 were awarded the fellowship.
Mary Wang is a writer and editor based in New York. She leads “Miscellaneous Files” on Guernica, a series of virtual studio visits in which writers use digital artifacts to talk about their practice. Her writing appears in BOMB, the Guardian, Longreads, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Republic, WNYC, and Vogue, among others. Her story “The Child Is A Mother Too” was a finalist for the Missouri Review 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize.
Jared Jackson was born in Hartford, CT. He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was awarded a Chair’s Fellowship and Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. His work has received support from the Tin House Winter Workshop and has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Yale Review, Guernica, and more. He has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and Baldwin for the Arts. He is currently the literary programs manager at PEN America.
