Jennifer Culkin (Nonfiction)

Jennifer Culkin is a critical-care RN who lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Her first book, A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2009, is a collection of essays that centers on her nearly 30 years of medical experience, including time as an emergency helicopter and flight nurse. Educated at Russell Sage College and The Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University, where she received her M.F.A. in 2007, her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review and The Utne Reader. Ms. Culkin’s Writer’s Award will provide her with the necessary time to focus on her next project, what she describes as a “genetic” memoir. “I want to trace my family back several generations, when they arrived in Boston from Ireland and Italy, and meld our personal history and unique traits with bleeding-edge research in neuropsychology and other social and biological sciences.”

Joanne Dominique Dwyer (Poetry)

Joanne Dominique Dwyer, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is working on her first collection of poems. She has a B.A. from the College of Santa Fe and will receive her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College in 2009. Ms. Dwyer’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Field, Conduit, and The Massachusetts Review. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to significantly reduce her bookkeeping work so that she can focus her attention on writing and completing her first book. Her nominator says, “Joanne’s capacity to weave researched material into poems of great personal feeling is no mean feat. She is also brutally, and tenderly, honest in her poems about the place of women and domestic life in our world. She is the real thing.”

Amy Leach (Nonfiction)

Amy Leach, of Evanston, Illinois, is working on her first book, a collection of essays that explores such diverse subjects as Eta Carinae (a star), peas, warblers, jellyfish, goats, and lizards. She addresses the spiritual and the everyday with a comic’s sense of timing to create something entirely original that falls on the boundary between prose and poetry. Her essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, A Public Space, and Identitytheory.com. Her nominator writes, “As a ‘lyric nature writer,’ Amy coordinates associative leaps, a wild imagination, and metaphor with the seeming rigor of nature or science writing to produce something wonderfully kooky and wholly her own.” Ms. Leach received her M.F.A. from The University of Iowa in 2005. She is an adjunct teacher at The University of St. Francis in Joliet and plays the piano at her local church. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to write full time to complete her first book.

Jolie Lewis (Fiction)

Jolie Lewis, of Richwood, West Virginia, is finishing her first novel, Farewell Avenue, which takes place in Alaska and involves the murder of a cab driver by a man in his thirties and two teenage boys. Ms. Lewis has a B.S. from Case Western Reserve University and an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. Her stories have appeared in Tin House and Shenandoah. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to focus on her writing for the next two years and help pay for child care. Her next novel, Coal Siding Run, takes place in a struggling West Virginia town and is the story of a young mother trying to leave the man who has been abusing her for years. Ms. Lewis’s nominator writes, “Jolie writes about people in complicated ethical situations, and her compassion is not of the easy, automatic sort. Her affection for this world shows in her work, not in any kind of sentimentality, but in the sharply deployed details that make her written worlds crisp and memorable.”

Hasanthika Sirisena (Fiction)

Hasanthika Sirisena, a Sri Lankan-American, is working on a coming-of-age novel, Edenboro, in which the protagonist, 15-year-old Jini de Foneska, and her family, newly arrived from Sri Lanka, try to make their way in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in the South. Ms. Sirisena is also working on a collection of short stories. Her story “Pine” was selected by Francine Prose for the 2005 Best New American Voices and her work has since appeared in Epoch, Witness, and the 2007 Annual StoryQuarterly. Ms. Sirisena lives in Jackson Heights, New York, and is an adjunct lecturer at City College New York, where she received her M.F.A. in 2006, and an instructor for Gotham Writers’ Workshop. She intends to use her Writer’s Award to live in Sri Lanka for a year to conduct essential research and finish both her novel and short story collection.

Therese Stanton (Fiction)

Therese Stanton received her B.A. from Smith College and an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Award. She is completing her first book, Reading and Writing in America, a novella and stories that address the issues of literacy and speech in America in a historical and cultural context. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to finish this project in the next year. The title story in the collection is a harrowing and electrifying piece told by a young runaway from a Lakota reservation. The novella, “All Songs Singing,” is an inventive and ambitious exploration of the loss and preservation of language as it tells the intertwining stories of Hinto Bluestone, a fictional character, and Walt Whitman who became fascinated with Native American languages during the Civil War. Ms. Stanton has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and The Blue Mountain Center. She lives in Tillson, New York.