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January 3, 2008
Creative Writing Professor Receives $25,000 NEA Fellowship
Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe to explore visual art, history and women in her writing.
Written by John Davis
Kolosov-Wenthe will publish her third poetry collection, "Ordinary," in 2008, a project enabled by a grant from the TTU Arts & Humanities Initiative.
Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe, associate professor of creative writing in the Department of English, received a $25,000 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She will use the grant to write a novel about Julie Manet, niece of painter Edouard Manet and daughter of impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot, to explore visual art, history and women. Also, she will develop a linked collection involving mothers and daughters that also includes autobiographical work.
“I am grateful and honored to receive this fellowship from the NEA which comes at a most rewarding and challenging time in my life,” Kolosov-Wenthe said. “In the same year I applied for the grant, I gave birth to my daughter, Sophie; published my first novel, ‘The Red Queen’s Daughter,’ and my first full-length poetry collection, ‘Vago.’
“The NEA has become for me a validation of the time I devote to writing, time which I must inevitably spend apart from my daughter.”
Kolosov-Wenthe was one of 40 writers to receive this grant for fiction and nonfiction prose. About 1,000 apply for the grant, and a writer can win this grant twice in a lifetime.
In addition to “The Red Queen’s Daughter,” she is the author of the children’s book, “Grace from China,” and the forthcoming young adult novel, “Miranda.” Her poetry collection, “Vago,” was published by Lewis-Clark Press.
Kolosov-Wenthe’s poetry collections, “Modigliani’s Muse” and “Ordinary” are forthcoming in 2008-2009. The co-editor of two anthologies of women’s prose, Jacqueline’s own prose and poetry have appeared in journals including Shenandoah, Orion, The Southern Review, Poetry and PRISM International. She earned her doctoral degree in literature from New York University in 1995, and now works in the genres of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
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