Kathleen Peirce wins Guggenheim Fellowship
to write a book-length poem

April 2007—Kathleen Peirce, award-winning poet and member of the Creative Writing faculty at Texas State University-San Marcos, is one of only nine poets in the U.S. and Canada to win a coveted 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship to write poetry.

The announcement was made recently by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York, which has been making the prestigious awards for 83 years. The 2007 Fellowship winners include 189 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7,600,000. Only one other Texas State faculty member has been a Guggenheim Fellow: novelist Dagoberto Gilb in 1995, also a member of the Creative Writing faculty. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners have appeared on the roll of Guggenheim Fellows, which includes Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.

“This is a major award that confirms Kathleen Peirce's stature as an important voice in contemporary American poetry. The award brings recognition not only to Kathleen but to our MFA Program in Creative Writing and to the University as a whole,” said Dr. Michael Hennessy, Chair of the Department of English.

"Daphne," by  Abraham Jamnitzer. This statue inspired Peirce's poem The Green Vault.

Peirce will use the Fellowship, a $39,000 grant, to travel and work on a book-length poem, tentatively titled The Green Vault. American poets have produced a number of book-length poems in the past few decades, she said, explaining that writing one is “the greatest challenge I can imagine for myself. To go forward as an artist, I have to do the things I don’t know how to do. I write in the direction of what I don’t have. It’s a relationship with the unknown, at least for me, and I think for many poets.”

“The Green Vault” is the name of a museum Peirce visited in Dresden, Germany, as a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005. Located in the Dresden Royal Palace, the Green Vault is one of Europe’s most famous treasure chambers, containing artworks of gold, silver, precious gems, enamel, ivory, bronze, and amber, from the Renaissance to the Classicist periods (see http://www.skd-dresden.de/en/museen/gruenes_gewoelbe.html).

“There, I saw a small, beautiful statue of Daphne, a mythological figure who was changed by the gods into a tree,” she said. “The statue was silver; her hands had been turned into coral branches, and a coral branch grew from the top of her head. The statue got me thinking about transformation generally, and about Dresden having transformed itself after its devastation in World War II. I have a good start on the poem—about cultural and personal loss and transformation—but it’s slow-going and hard to do while I’m teaching. The Fellowship will enable me to take some time away from the classroom to travel and write,” she said. She plans to return to Dresden and may also go to the Yucatán in Mexico.

During her NEA Fellowship in 2004, Peirce began writing toward her long poem. Peirce’s collections of poems also include The Ardors (Ausable Press 2004) and The Oval Hour (University of Iowa Press 1999), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize as well as the Los Angeles Book Award. Divided Touch, Divided Color (Windhover Press) is a hand made, fine arts press book that currently sells to collectors for hundreds of dollars. Peirce’s first collection, Mercy (University of Pittsburgh Press 1991), was published three years after her graduation from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. It was awarded the Associated Writing Programs Award for Poetry. Peirce was inducted in 2004 as a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and is especially proud of her Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching presented by Dean Ellis in 1999. This year she was named Texas State’s Honors Professor of the Year.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by United States Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to a son who died April 26, 1922. The Foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed.

Texas State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing has been ranked in the top 20 nationally by U.S. News and World Report and recognized by the Virginia-based professional organization Associated Writing Programs and by The New York Times. The program is known for its award-winning faculty and students, its outreach to school children and to the community through the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, and for its visiting writers series. The program is also the home of the prestigious Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative Writing, held currently by novelist Denis Johnson, winner of the Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993) and the Whiting Writer’s Award (1986). Other chairholders have included Barry Hanna, winner of the PEN/Malamud Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story, National Book Award-winner Tim O’Brien, MacArthur Genius Award-winner Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ai, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.