Maya Pindyck, PhD, assistant professor and writing program director, has received a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Pindyck is one of 35 poets selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants. Fellowships from the NEA are among the most prestigious in the literary world, and alternate between poetry and prose each year. This year’s fellowships are to support poetry. Fellows are selected through a highly competitive, anonymous process and are judged solely on the artistic excellence of the work sample provided.
“I feel shocked and amazed and really, really overjoyed,” she said. But joy wasn’t the first thing she felt when she learned through a phone call from the NEA that she had won the grant on her second time applying for it.
“I thought this is obviously a prank, I didn’t believe it at all,” Pindyck said. “Slowly, she convinced me it was not a prank, and I was just totally shocked and screaming and dancing with joy.”
“A recent national survey shows reading poetry is making a comeback,” said Mary Anne Carter, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “The National Endowment for the Arts supports our nation’s poets and encourages a wide range of voices and styles.”
SUMMER WRITING
This summer, Pindyck plans to focus on poems that look into whiteness and Jewishness and the spaces where those identities overlap.
“I’ve been writing a lot of poems around whiteness and my identity as an Israeli-American and also a lot of poems about moths and my relationship to other species,” she said. She will be working to find the connections among the poems to pull them together to form a book.
One of Pindyck’s poems has been added to a time capsule, along with writings and drawings from 21 others, that has been placed in a glacier in Antarctica. The capsule, a project by artist Jessica Houston called Letter to the Future, was deposited in the Maud Dronning Ice Shelf in mid-February. It is designed not to be discovered for 1,000 years. The names of the contributors, including Pindyck’s, are engraved on the capsule.
Pindyck, who is a mother to a 1-year-old and a 4-and-a-half-year-old, said the grant will help pay for childcare so she can carve out time to write.
“I’d like to rent a house for a week, where I can make a self-made residency and go and write, and maybe invite a couple friends who are also writing and just wanting that space,” she said.
Pindyck is the author of Emoticoncert (Four Way Books, 2016), Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, 2009), and Locket, Master (Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, 2006). Her visual work has been exhibited widely, and her scholarship on creative practices, social justice and schooling has been published in a range of academic journals. In 2005, she co-founded an abortion story archive: Project Voice. Pindyck earned her PhD in English education from Columbia University's Teachers College, her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and her BA in studio art and philosophy from Connecticut College.
See more of Pindyck’s work here. The full list of Creative Writing fellows is here.
