On Tuesday, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the winners of the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards. Ten poets and seven fiction writers from the United States and Canada who demonstrate "distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment" each received grants averaging $43,157. The fellows in poetry are Meena Alexander, Rae Armantrout, Tim Bowling, Michael Paul Burkard, Dan Chiasson, Forrest Gander, Bob Hicok, Jack Marshall, Reginald Shepherd, and Bill Zavatsky. The fiction fellows are Dean Bakopoulos, Lan Samantha Chang, Tony D'Souza, Matthew Klam, Sam Lipsyte, Vyvyane Loh, and Thad Ziolkowski.
A total of $8.2 million was given this year to one hundred and ninety established writers, artists, and professionals in the humanities and natural and social sciences to "assist research and artistic creation." Fellows who are unaffiliated with or hold only adjunct postitions at academic institutions were presented with supplemental grants courtesy of the Leon Levy Foundation.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded over $265 million to more than sixteen thousand individual artists and scholars since it was founded in 1925 in New York City. The winners of a second round of fellowships, given to residents of Latin America and the Caribbean, will be announced in June.
