10 writers are Stanford’s newest Stegner Fellows

Five poets and five fiction writers are entering Stanford this fall as the 2011-13 Stanford Creative Writing Program’s Wallace Stegner Fellows. This year’s writers were chosen from a pool of almost 1,900 applicants, the largest ever.

The two-year fellowship program , named after novelist and Creative Writing Program founder Wallace Stegner, covers tuition and health insurance and provides each of the fellows with a $26,000-per-year stipend.

This year’s fellows:

Poetry

Kai Carlson-Wee, a former professional rollerblader, holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Mario Chard is finishing his MFA program at Purdue University. He plans to explore the Hispanic-American experience and the power of metaphor in poetry.

Chiyuma Elliott plans to write two ekphrastic poem series, one on race, the other on privacy. She completed an MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College and is finishing her PhD in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dana Koster hopes to complete her book of poetry, Mother Ghost. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell University.

Mira Rosenthal earned her MFA from the University of Houston and her PhD from Indiana University. She is about to publish her first book of poetry.

Fiction

Juliana Xuan Wang received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University in June. She has been working on a series of stories about disenchanted outsiders obsessed with the concept of home.

Shannon Pufahl is finishing her PhD in English from the University of California- Davis. She will be working on her novel, Lines and Lines, a story of life in the American West.

Anthony Marra will be working on his novel, tentatively titled A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, set in modern Chechnya. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in June.

Helen Hooper, a former policy analyst at the Nature Conservancy, plans to use the fellowship to complete a collection of short stories. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

David Kim writes about the notion of the visibility and invisibility of minorities. He holds a master’s degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa.

Media

Cynthia Haven, Stanford News Service: (650) 724-6184, cynthia.haven [a] stanford (p) edu