Rivka Galchen (Fiction)

Rivka Galchen, of New York City, has just completed her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2003 with a focus in psychiatry. She is currently working on an intricate and inventive first novel, Open Letter to the Royal Academy of Meteorology, about a 51-year-old psychiatrist who develops the conviction that his young Argentinean wife has been replaced with an exact look-alike. Galchen is also interested in writing essays that explore the intersection of literature and cognitive science. She is currently working on an essay about the German writer and psychiatrist Oskar Panizza. She plans to use her Writers’ Award to devote the next year almost exclusively to these projects.

Ellen Litman (Fiction)

Ellen Litman’s first collection of stories, The Last Chicken in America, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2007. It is set in a Jewish/Russian neighborhood of Pittsburgh and deals with experiences of immigration and assimilation. Litman immigrated to the United States from Moscow at 19 and has a B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, Triquarterly, and Best New American Voices 2007. She is currently working on a coming-of-age novel set in Russia during the Gorbachev years and perestroika. She plans to use her grant to return to Moscow to do research for the novel. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Melissa Range (Poetry)

Melissa Range, of Decatur, Georgia, has a B.A. from The University of Tennessee, an M.F.A. from Old Dominion, and an M.T.S. from Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry London, and Western Humanities Review, and she is working on a collection of poems entitled Scriptorium. Range is also working on a second collection entitled The Lay of Wandering Edris, a long poem about the Appalachian South. Range plans to use her grant to take time off from her work as a cataloger for the Pitts Theology Library of Emory University to concentrate fully on these two projects and to take a research trip to Tennessee.

Emily Rapp (Fiction/Nonfiction)

Emily Rapp’s first book, Poster Child, will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2007. Part memoir/part travelogue, she interweaves the story of her life as a disabled person with the year she spent abroad as a Fulbright Scholar. Rapp is now working on two novels, The Beekeeper’s Year and The Second City, a family saga that takes place during the violent and tumultuous times of modern-day Northern Ireland. She plans to use her Writer’s Award to further research these projects and travel to Ireland and London. She holds a B.A. from Saint Olaf College, an M.F.A. in fiction and poetry from the University of Texas, and an M.A. from Harvard Divinity School. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of Antioch University in Los Angeles and lives in Santa Monica.

Rita Mae Reese (Fiction/Poetry)

Rita Mae Reese lives in San Francisco and is currently a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She has also received a 2005 “Discovery”/The Nation Prize and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship in poetry from the University of Wisconsin where she earned her M.F.A. Reese is currently working on a novel entitled Local Usage, which is set in West Virginia in the 1960s, against the backdrop of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. She is also completing her first poetry collection, A History of Accidents, and is excited about moving onto her next poetry project—a documentary/biography of Flannery O’Connor. Reese plans to use her Writer’s Award to devote her full attention to these projects.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Nonfiction)

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, of New York City, has a B.A. from Harvard and is a freelance writer and editor, as well as a contributing editor for Transition Magazine. Her first book of creative nonfiction, Harlem is Nowhere, will be published by Little, Brown in 2008. She describes her work as “being a three-volume literary pilgrimage to locations I refer to as black ‘utopias’: Harlem, Haiti, and the Black Belt of the American South.” She recently finished a Lannan Foundation Residency and will begin her Fulbright Scholarship in Creative Writing this fall. Rhodes-Pitts plans to use her grant for language study (Kreyol) and travel to Haiti to conduct essential preliminary research for her second book project. Originally from Houston, Texas, she now lives in Harlem.