Visiting Poet at CCNY and Hodder Fellowship winner Nicole Sealey. Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Award-winning poet and author Nicole Sealey is adding another accolade to her numerous honors. The Doris Lippman Visiting Poet in The City College of New York’s MFA in Creative Writing Program is one of five winners internationally of 2019-2020 Hodder fellowships.
The awards are presented by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. They provide artists and humanists in the early stages of their careers, with “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts,” an opportunity to undertake significant new work.
Sealey’s fellow nationally renowned co-recipients are:
- Visual artist Ryan Gander;
- Writer Kaitlyn Greenidge;
- Playwright Hansol Jung; and
- Choreographer Will Rawls.
Announcing the awards, Michael Cadden, chair of the Lewis Center, said, “Mrs. Hodder recognized the need for what she called ‘studious leisure’ to give people the time they need to tackle major projects. Her model was John Milton’s father, who underwrote the research necessary to the creation of Paradise Lost. In the University’s role as a patron of the arts, we’re happy to welcome these five talented artists to the Princeton community. We hope they experience their Hodder year as ‘paradise regained.’”
Past Hodder Fellows have included Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, playwright and actor Danai Gurira, choreographer Nora Chipaumire, and composer and lyricist Michael Friedman.
Born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Sealey is the author of “Ordinary Beast,” a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and “The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named,” winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.
Her other honors include the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award, and the Poetry International Prize. She has, in addition, received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony, and the Poetry Project.
Sealey’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times.
The Doris Lippman Visiting Poet is a guest faculty position in the MFA program that is generously funded by the Lippman and Himmelfarb family.
About The City College of New York
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