The Stegner Fellowship program is a two-year creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. The award is named after American Wallace Stegner (1909–1993), a historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and Stanford faculty member who founded the university's creative writing program.
Ten fellowships are awarded every year, five in fiction and five in poetry. The recipients do not need a degree to receive the fellowships, though many fellows already hold the terminal M.F.A. degree in creative writing. A workshop-based program, no degree is awarded after the two-year fellowship. Prior to 1990, many fellows also enrolled in Stanford's now-defunct M.A. program in creative writing.[1][2]
Fellows receive a stipend of $50,000 per year, as well as health insurance and their tuition fee for Stanford.[3] Fellows are required to live close enough to Stanford to be able to attend all workshops, as well as other department-related readings and events.
Stegner founded the Stanford creative writing department and fellowship program in 1946. Initial funding was supplied by Dr. E. H. Jones, brother of the chair of the Stanford English Department, Richard Foster Jones. Initially the fellowship was for three writing fellows per year, many of whom were World War II veterans returning home from overseas. In 1973, then-director John L'Heureux expanded the program to include eight fiction writers and eight poets per year.[4] In 1992, the program expanded again to ten fiction writers and ten poets each year.
The current poetry faculty for the program consists of Louise Gluck, A. Van Jordan, and Patrick Phillips. The current fiction faculty for the program consists of Elizabeth Tallent, Adam Johnson and Chang-Rae Lee.[3] Other notable writers often serve as guest instructors for a quarter as part of other endowed lectureships. Recent visiting writers include Heather McHugh, Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, Robert Pinsky, Colm Toibin, Li-Young Lee and, just before his death in 2004, Thom Gunn. Notable previous long-term faculty include W. S. Di Piero and Denise Levertov in poetry; and John L'Heureux and Nancy Packer in fiction.