Some bright news as the worst of winter settles in. This week I was awarded a literature fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council! It’s really such an honor to be included with so many great Nebraska authors whose work I admire and who I consider friends.

The program recognizes “exemplary work by Nebraska artists” and rotates through different art forms on a three-year cycle. This is the fourth time I’ve applied for the fellowship. Only a decade of futility there before breaking through–so not too bad!

I’ve been hard at work on a new novel over the past year, the last few months especially. This recognition is a great validation of that project and will help me with research at some point. Of course, this comes a year after I won an National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to work on the same project. Hopefully someday soon I’ll be able to use these awards to fund the travel for which they were intended. Last March I made it to Paris just before everything shut down, with that trip having to be cut a few days short because of uncertainty that I’d be able to get back into the US. I’d had things lined up to return to Paris and visit Bad Nauheim and Stuttgart toward the end of 2020, but you know the rest. Someday–hopefully before the book is published–there will be some travel to Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Salzburg, and maybe the Extremadura region of Spain.

Thanks so much to the Nebraska Arts Council for helping to make those trips possible, once they’re possible again. Cheers!