Students in The Writing Institute are eligible for The Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College, an award funded by The Gurfein Family Foundation designed to provide two recipients with a year-long opportunity to work closely with a mentor on a writing project of their choice. Previous Gurfein Fellows have been signed by literary agents and are published in newspapers, magazines, and journals.

The Gurfein Board

The following distinguished board of writers selects the recipients:

Mark Medoff (Panel Chairman): Playwright, screenwriter, and director of stage, film, and opera. Mr. Medoff received a Tony Award for Children of a Lesser God, for which he was also nominated for an Academy Award. He is the winner of London’s Society of West End Theatres Award for best play and nominee for a Cable Ace Award for his HBO premiere movie, Apology. He has also received an OBIE Award for When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? Mr. Medoff was co-founder of the American Southwest Theatre Company and Head of the Department of Theatre Arts for nine years. He is currently Distinguished Lecturer in Playwriting at the University of Houston. He has also been named Senior Fellow in the Creative Media Institute at New Mexico State University, where he taught for 27 years.

Barbara Gordon: Three-time Emmy Award winning documentary film producer, writer, NBC Today Show writer-producer, WCBS-TV EYE On Documentary Series, Writer-Producer of PBS's The Great American Dream Machine and Black Journal, and best-selling author of I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can. Ms. Gordon is also the author of Jennifer Fever, and the novel Defects of the Heart.

Andrew Gross: author of New York Times best-selling thrillers, The Blue Zone and The Dark Tide, and co-author of five #1-bestsellers with James Patterson, including the Women’s Murder Club series, Lifeguard, and Judge and Jury. Don’t Look Twice, Mr. Gross’s new thriller, will be published in March by William Morrow.

Stephen Lang: Tony-nominated, Drama Desk, and Helen Hayes Award-winning actor and writer. Stephen is also the Co-artistic director of the Actor’s Studio in New York. Mr. Lang’s highly anticipated new film, Avatar, directed by Academy Award winning writer, James Cameron, is being released in the spring.

Rachel Cohen (Sarah Lawrence Writing Faculty): author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists published by Random House and chosen as one of the LA Times best books of the year and recipient of the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Ms. Cohen has received numerous honors including a Fellowship at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, and Fellowships at The New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, the oldest artist’s colony in the United States.

Gurfein Fellowship Mentors

The Gurfein Writing Fellows receive a year of one-on-one mentoring with outstanding members of The Sarah Lawrence Faculty.

Suzanne Gardinier is the author of The New World, winner of Associated Writing Programs Award Series in poetry; A World That Will Hold All the People, essays on poetry and politics; Today: 101 Ghazals; and a new long poem called “Dialogue with the Archipelago.” Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The American Voice, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in the Essay and of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.

Mary LaChapelle is the author of House of Heroes and Other Stories; and the recipient of PEN/Nelson Algren, Whiting, and Katherine Anne Porter awards, and of a Bush Foundation fellowship.

Fellows are invited to read their work at a reception held in their honor in December at which time the 2010 nominees will be announced by the Director of the Center for Continuing Education at Sarah Lawrence College.

To be considered for the Gurfein Fellowship, applicants must be enrolled in one of the many courses offered at The Center for Continuing Education’s Writing Institute. The Gurfein Writing Fellowship is the first and only fellowship in the nation to be awarded to nonmatriculating students.