Students in The Writing Institute are eligible for The Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College, an award funded by The Gurfein Family Foundation and designed to provide two recipients chosen by a select panel of judges with a yearlong 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.

Fifth Annual 2010 Gurfein Writing Fellowship Award Winners

The Search, by Susan Kleinman, who studied with Pat Dunn and Jimin Han in the Novel Writing Workshop, and Smiling in Your Buster Browns, by Anne Miyamoto Timmins, who also studied with Pat Dunn and Jimin Han in the Novel Writing Workshop, share this year’s honor. Their work was selected from over forty extraordinary entries, a record number for the fellowship. In fact, because we had so many strong submissions, The Gurfein Family Foundation has selected Patrick, R.I.P. by Jennifer Armocida for honorable mention. The two Gurfein Writing Fellows will receive a year of one-on-one mentoring with outstanding members of the Sarah Lawrence faculty. This year, our distinguished mentors are author Suzanne Gardinier, recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in the Essay and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, and author Mary LaChapelle, recipient of awards from PEN/Nelson Algren, Whiting, Katherine Anne Porter, and a Bush Foundation Fellowship. Suzanne Gardinier and Mary LaChapelle provide a unique opportunity to our recipients by working for two semesters both as personal tutor and editor on a writing project of the Fellows' choice to further develop and hone their talent and writing skills. We enthusiastically congratulate all nominees for their impressive submissions and look forward to another outstanding year in The Writing Institute!

Past Judges

Mark Medoff: (Panel Chair): 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 and writer. Barbara Gordon has worked as a writer for NBC’s Today Show; a writer-producer for WCBS-TV’s Eye On Documentary Series; a writer-producer for PBS’s The Great American Dream Machine and Black Journal. She is the best- selling author of I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can, Jennifer Fever, and Defects of the Heart.

Andrew Gross: Author of The 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, was published in March 2009 by William Morrow.

Stephen Lang: Tony-nominated, Drama Desk, and Helen Hayes Award winning actor and writer. Stephen Lang is also the co-artistic director of the Actor’s Studio in New York. Mr. Lang’s highly anticipated film, Avatar, directed by Academy-Award-winning writer James Cameron, was released in December 2009.

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 L.A 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 artists’ colony in the United States.

Nelly Reifler: BA, Hampshire College. MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. Author of short story collection See Through; fiction in magazines and journals including Bomb, Post Road, McSweeney’s, Nerve, and Black Book, as well as in anthologies including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11; Lost Tribe: New Jewish Fiction from the Edge, and Found Magazine's Requiem for a Paper Bag. Recipient of a Henfield Prize in 1995, a UAS Explorations Prize in 1997, and a Rotunda Gallery Emerging Curator grant for work with fiction and art in 2001. Columnist for Nextbook.org, 2006-2009; codirector of Pratt Institute’s Friday Forum, 2005-present; founder and president, Dainty Rubbish record company.

More About The Gurfein Fellowship

The Gurfein Writing Fellows receive a year of one-on-one mentoring with outstanding members of the Sarah Lawrence faculty. Gurfein Fellowship Mentor Suzanne Gardinier is the author of The New World, winner of the 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. Gurfein Fellowship Mentor Mary LaChapelle is the author of House of Heroes and Other Stories; recipient of awards from PEN/Nelson Algren, Whiting, Katherine Anne Porter, and a Bush Foundation fellowship.

Fellows are invited to read their work at a reception held in their honor in December, at which time the 2011 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.

For more information on this unique award, please contact The Writing Institute at (914) 395-2205.