Nan Cohen (poetry)

Nan Cohen (Poetry), of Van Nuys, California, has taught English at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, California, and is Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. In 2005-06, Cohen will be Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Her first book of poems, Rope Bridge, was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2005, and she has begun a second collection, Portions, which will explore themes from the Torah.

Averill Curdy (poetry)

Averill Curdy (Poetry), of Chicago, will be teaching at Northwestern University in fall 2005. Curdy began writing poetry in her mid-thirties after a career in the communications business, and her poetry and criticism have appeared in Poetry magazine. She will use her grant to work on a sequence of lyric poems tentatively entitled Ovid in America, focusing on the lives of various explorers, naturalists, and nature painters associated with exploration and the New World.

Rebecca Curtis (fiction)

Rebecca Curtis (Fiction), lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. She is working on a collection of stories, which have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, and McSweeney's among other publications. Curtis has begun to research a novel based on a memoir of an Armenian woman who survived the Turkish genocide. Curtis plans to use her Writer's Award for her research and travel to Armenia.

Frances Hwang (fiction)

Frances Hwang (Fiction), of San Francisco, California, was the 2004-05 Olive B. O'Connor Creative Writing Fellow at Colgate University. Her work has been chosen by Francine Prose and Joyce Carol Oates to appear in the prestigious Best New American Voices series. She is at work on Transparency, a collection of short stories that explores the lives of a wide variety of Chinese immigrants and their American-born children. Her Jaffe Award will allow her the time next year to complete her story collection.

Aryn Kyle (fiction)

Aryn Kyle (Fiction), lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. She published her first story, "Foaling Season," in The Atlantic Monthly in 2004, and is currently expanding it into a first novel. She has since published stories in The Georgia Review, Best New American Voices, 2005, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and StoryQuarterly and was a National Magazine Award Winner in Fiction. She plans to use her Writer's Award to complete both her novel and short story collection.

Asali Solomon (fiction)

Asali Solomon (Fiction), of Lexington, Virginia, is an assistant professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Her collection of stories, set mostly among African-American adolescents in 1980 's Philadelphia, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in fall 2006. She is also at work on a novel, Disgruntled, drawing on the story of a Barbadian man who in 1914 burned down "Taliesin," Frank Lloyd Wright's home, where he worked. She will use her grant to travel and conduct research for this project.