Institutional News

Bennington Writing Seminars PEN/Emerging Voices Scholarship Renewed

The Bennington Writing Seminars, in partnership with PEN Center USA, has announced that during the September 2018 admissions period, it will once again be offering a scholarship of $10,000 to an alumni of PEN's Emerging Voices Fellowship program.

Writing Seminars logo and images of the three recipients

This is the second year that Bennington and PEN America have teamed up to offer such scholarships, and this year's PEN/Emerging Voices scholarship is made possible thanks to the generosity of the June 2018 graduating class.

Bennington Writing Seminars offers this scholarship in partnership with the PEN/Emerging Voices Fellowship. Effective during the September 2018 admissions period (deadline is Sept. 1, 2018) for the January 2019 residency, Bennington will grant a scholarship in the amount of $10,000 across four terms ($2,500 per term), to an Emerging Voices Fellow.

If a candidate is not selected for January admission, the scholarship will be available for an Emerging Voices Fellow for the March 1, 2019 admissions period, with a June 2019 start date. 

The Emerging Voices Scholarship was established last year thanks to the generosity of the January Class of 2017.

From the inaugural 2017 announcement:

The Bennington Writing Seminars, in partnership with PEN Center USA, has announced three recipients of its MFA scholarship for Emerging Voices. The $10,000 scholarship has been awarded to fiction writer Shari Poindexter (EV '01). The Writing Seminars has also extended two additional scholarships to fiction writers Monica Carter (EV ‘10) and Davin Malasarn (EV ‘08).

Shari Poindexter (EV '01)is a doctoral candidate in Occupational Therapy at USC who has led seminars and workshops on a range of healthcare issues specifically for cancer survivors and underserved populations. She is also a Hospice volunteer. Poindexter was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, and she earned a John Densmore Scholarship at UCLA and a May Merrill Miller award for outstanding short story.

Monica Carter (EV '10) is Program Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation's LGBTQ Writers-in-Schools program. She was a PEN Center USA MARK Program Fiction Fellow, a Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT Emerging Writer Fellow, and a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow.

Davin Malasarn (EV '08)is Lead Writer and Director of Presidential Communications at Cal Tech. He has a Ph.D. in biology, and was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest, and was a featured writer for the New Short Fiction Series.