Two UMKC professors receive Guggenheim Fellowships
Two University of Missouri-Kansas City College of Arts and Sciences’ professors, Christie Hodgen and Clancy Martin, received 2011 Guggenheim Fellowships.
Christie Hodgen’s “A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw” received the AWP Award for Short Fiction and was one of three finalists for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Hodgen is an assistant professor in the Department of English and specializes in fiction, creative writing, contemporary literature and the history of the short story. She is the author of “A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw” (UMASS, 2003), winner of the AWP Award in Fiction; and “Hello, I Must Be Going” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), which was featured in Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers series. Her short stories have appeared in The Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and New Stories from the South. Her awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.
Hodgen will be writing her fourth book of fiction, a collection of short stories titled “Bedtime Stories for the Middle-Aged”. The stories vary in subject matter, but are related studies of characters in mid-life, facing personal, familial and professional crises.
“This is a rare honor made even more remarkable by the fact that two UMKC professors have been granted Guggenheim Fellowships in the same year,” Hodgen said. “I know I can speak for both of us when I say that we’re both quite grateful for the support of the Guggenheim Foundation and our UMKC home.”
Best-selling author Jonathan Franzen said Clancy Martin’s “How to Sell: A Novel” “…has pretty much strength I could ask for in an American novel.”
Martin is chair of the Department of Philosophy and specializes in 19th and 20th Century European philosophy, the intersections of philosophy and literature and the ethics of advertising and selling. Martin has authored several books in philosophy, including “Honest Work” (Oxford University Press, 2006) with Robert Solomon and Joanne Ciulla; “How to Sell: A Novel” (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009); “The Philosophy of Deception” (Oxford University Press, 2010); and “Love, Lies and Marriage” (forthcoming, Farrar Straus & Giroux). In addition to his appointment as professor at the College of Arts and Sciences, Martin is a professor of Business Ethics at the Bloch School, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The London Review of Books and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.
Martin plans to use the fellowship to research the exotic animal trade in South America and Asia, which will form the basis for a book called “The Primitive”.
To see a full list of this year’s recipients, visit the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship Foundation Web site at http://www.gf.org/.