Three MFA faculty members win Guggenheim Fellowships

Jos Charles, Kaveh Akbar, and Julia Phillips

Three Randolph College MFA in creative writing faculty members have been awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships. 

Jos Charles, Kaveh Akbar, and Julia Phillips were part of a group of 188 fellows chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process. The fellows—artists, scholars, photographers, essayists, novelists, poets, historians, choreographers, environmentalists, and data scientists—work across 52 disciplines. 

Now in its 99th year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gives each fellow a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level, under the “freest possible conditions.” 

Charles is the author of several poetry collections, including Pulitzer Prize finalist feeld, which was also longlisted for the National Book Award and selected as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series. She is also the founding editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the United States, and engages in direct gender justice work with a variety of organizations and performers. 

Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. The author of two poetry collections and a chapbook, he has received multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize. He is also poetry editor of The Nation and will publish his first novel, Martyr!, this year. 

Phillips is the bestselling author of the novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. She has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, and her second novel, Bear, will be published this summer.