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Professor of English Suzanne Matson is among the recipients of the 2012 Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts for a work of fiction currently in progress.
“It's an immense honor to receive an NEA, one for which I'm very grateful, and it's already given my writing new momentum,” said Matson, who is chair of the English Department. “My current fiction project has been changing shapes for a while—first it was a historical novel, and now it's a novel-in-stories that's partly contemporary, and partly historical.
The fact that the NEA Fellowship was awarded for an excerpt of it gives me the confidence to plunge ahead with a new sense of excitement.”
Competition for the NEA awards is extremely rigorous; this year the Creative Writing Fellowships Panel reviewed 1,179 eligible applications.
Matson has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Her novels are The Tree-Sitter, A Trick of Nature and The Hunger Moon, and she has published two books of poetry, Durable Goods and Sea Level — many of the poems in these volumes were previously published in journals including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review and Shenandoah.