Three Bard Faculty Members Win Celebrated Guggenheim Fellowships

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Bradford Morrow, and Stephen Westfall Are Awarded for their Respective Work in Nonfiction, Fiction, and Visual Art

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Three Bard faculty members—Verlyn Klinkenborg, visiting professor of literature; Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow; and Stephen Westfall, faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts—are among the 189 winners of the 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 83rd annual competition for the United States and Canada. Klinkenborg, Morrow, and Westfall were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their respective work in nonfiction, fiction, and art.

The diverse fellowship winners include artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants in 78 different fields, from natural science to creative arts, for awards totaling $7,600,000. Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers and are approved by the Guggenheim Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Bard visiting professor of literature, is a writer and member of the editorial board of the New York Times. Born in Colorado in 1952 and raised in Iowa and California, Klinkenborg graduated from Pomona College and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University. He is the author of Making Hay (1986), The Last Fine Time (1991), The Rural Life (2003), and Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile (2006). Of his most recent book, Publisher’s Weekly writes: “[A] gorgeous hybrid of naturalist observation, novelistic invention, and philosophical meditation . . . studied, beautiful reflections on the present and memory, earth and weather, love and utility, human and beast.” His work has appeared in many magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, National Geographic, New Republic, Smithsonian, Audubon, GQ, Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, Sports Afield, and New York Times Magazine. He has taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University, St. Olaf College, Bennington College, and Harvard University and is a recipient of the 1991 Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Bradford Morrow, Bard professor of literature and Bard Center fellow, is a novelist, poet, and the founding editor of the literary journal Conjunctions, published by Bard College. Morrow graduated from the University of Colorado and was a Danforth Fellow at Yale University. He is the author of the novels Come Sunday (1988); The Almanac Branch (1991), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Trinity Fields (1995); Giovanni’s Gift (1997); and Ariel’s Crossing (2002). Donna Seaman writes in Booklist of his most recent novel: “Morrow . . . dissects the bonds of family and land, ponders questions of integrity and faith, and assesses the toll the nuclear menace exacts from our collective soul.” He has also published several volumes of poetry including Posthumes: Selected Poems 1877-1982 and A Bestiary (1991). Morrow has edited numerous books, including The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002; with Sam Hamill). His debut children’s book, Didn’t Didn’t Do It (Putnam/May 2007), is a playfully inventive collaboration—featuring nifty wordplay by Morrow and illustrations by veteran cartoonist Gahan Wilson—about a group of children who set out to build a tree house but never get it done. He won the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters in 1998, the O. Henry Prize in 2003, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award in 2007.

Stephen Westfall, faculty and cochair of the department of painting at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, is an artist who exhibits work in the United States and Europe, and is widely reviewed, most recently in the New York Times, Art in America, New Criterion, Partisan Review, and L’Express. Westfall was born in 1953 in Schenectady, New York, and received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Art, Flash Art, and other magazines. In 2001, Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times, described his paintings as “delicately calibrated destabilizations . . . tattersall grids [that] have jagged intersections; his colors tend toward off-key, either pale or a little rich; his corners never square. With everything slightly ajar, a subtle yet marvelously optical jostling of form and space sets in. In [his] latest work, this jostling has increased almost to the point of breaking into dance.” He has been the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and two fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $256 million in fellowships to more than 16,250 individuals. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize-winners appear on the roll of 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. The full list of 2007 fellows may be viewed at http://www.gf.org.

This event was last updated on 10-27-2008

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