Creative Writing Professor Awarded Guggenheim
Lucy Corin, a UC Davis Department of English professor of creative writing, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She plans to use the fellowship to work on her next novel, tentatively titled Les and Rae. She is one of eight fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.
“(The book) is about a couple who respond to current cultural pressures differently — one joins an underground gun group and one sneaks away into the woods at the edge of their neighborhood,” she said.
Corin's most recent novel is The Swank Hotel, published in 2021. She is also author of the story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and the New American Stories anthology from Vintage Contemporaries. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has been at UC Davis since 2004 and holds a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University and a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University.
“One of the incredible things about a fellowship like this is that I don’t have to know my timeline or publisher," Corin said. “I can use the funds to support the natural growth of the project as a work of art and take the rest from there.”
Other recent Guggenheim fellows from the College of Letters and Science are: Ali Anooshahr, history, and L.M. Bogad, theatre and dance, 2021; Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, art history, 2020; Ari Kelman, history, and Elizabeth Miller, English, 2019.
Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the fellowship program started in 1925. Since its inception, the foundation has awarded about $400 million to 18,000 individuals in many fields. This year, 171 fellows in 48 disciplines were selected from 2,500 applicants.