Fellowship Program

A composer with a gift for incorporating many influences and styles within her work, Nkeiru Okoye is perhaps best known for her opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom (2014), her orchestral work Voices Shouting Out (2002), which she composed as an artistic response to 9/11, and her piano suite, African Sketches (2004). Dr. Okoye has received numerous awards, commissions and honors from arts and civic organizations. The State of Michigan issued a proclamation acknowledging her “extraordinary contributions” to the history of Detroit for Black Bottom (2020), commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She is the recipient of the inaugural International Florence Price Festival Award for Composition.

Her works largely combine musical storytelling, research, and historical narrative, often drawing upon African American experiences. More information can be found on her website www.nkeiruokoye.com.

Photo courtesy of the Fellow.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and is currently based out of Vancouver B.C. and Milwaukee, WI.  He began making films in Portland in 2011 when he also began studying and teaching chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media.

Alison Bechdel is an internationally recognized cartoonist. For much of her thirty-year career she skulked on the cultural margins, writing, drawing, and self-syndicating the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. The generational chronicle, “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period,” (Ms.) ran regularly in over fifty LGBT publications in North America and the UK. Many award-winning collections of Dykes were published in book form by an independent feminist press, and were translated into several languages.

Bechdel gained wider recognition for her work with the publication in 2006 of her groundbreaking graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Fun Home was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, and in a great moment for graphic narrative, was named Best Book of 2006 by Time Magazine. Time called the tightly architected investigation into her closeted bisexual father’s suicide “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.”

After setting aside Dykes to Watch Out For in 2008, Bechdel began devoting herself full-time to autobiographical work. A second graphic memoir, this one about her relationship with her mother, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May 2012. Kirkus has given Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama a starred review, calling it “a psychologically complex, ambitious, illuminating successor to the author's graphic-memoir masterpiece.”

In her work, Bechdel is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and the personal spheres. Dykes to Watch Out For was an explicitly community-based and politically engaged project. But in her deeply intimate memoirs about her father’s life before the gay-rights movement and her mother’s life before the women’s movement, she turns a microscopic lens on the internal mechanisms of oppression and liberation.

During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be working on her third family memoir, an inquiry into the nature of family itself that will draw on sources from Margaret Mead to Family Systems Therapy to the complex sibling relationships between Alice, Henry, and William James.

Bechdel edited Best American Comics 2011. She has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. Her work is widely anthologized and translated.

In the spring of 2012, Bechdel is the Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago. At Chicago, she is co-teaching a course with Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Hillary Chute called Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography.

Profile photograph by Elena Seibert.

Follow this link to watch a short video interview.
Follow this link to view a recent video interview for the website of the journal Critical Inquiry.

As published in the Foundation’s Report for 1933–34:

McCLINTOCK, BARBARA: Appointed for cytogenetic researches in the field of the mechanism of heredity, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Biologie, Berlin; tenure, twelve months from November 1, 1933.

Born June 16, 1902, at Hartford, Connecticut. Education: Cornell University, B.S., 1923, M.A., 1925, Ph.D., 1927. National Research Fellow, University of Missouri and California Institute of Technology, 1931–33.

Assistant in Botany, 1924–27, Instructor in Botany, 1927–31, Cornell University.

Publications: Articles in American Naturalist, Science, Stain Technology, Journal of Heredity, Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics, Bulletin of the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, Zeitschrift für Zellforschung und mikroskopische Anatomie.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into thirteen languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was published in January 2020, and was an Indie Next selection and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and A Public Space, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper's, among others. He has taught at New York University; the University of Mississippi, where he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence; and Grinnell College. He lives in Iowa City, and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Photo Credit: Oriette D'Angelo