Joyce Hinnefeld Awarded Creative Arts Fellowship
Joyce Hinnefeld, associate professor of English and director of the Writing Center, has been awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). Hinnefeld is one of approximately twenty Fellows who will receive funding to work on their creative projects at a retreat for visual artists, writers, and composers. The retreat will be held at the VCCA, located near Sweet Briar College in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia. Residencies, typically two weeks to two months long, provide artists a distraction-free atmosphere in which to work.
Serving more than 300 artists a year, the VCCA is one of the nation's largest year-round artists' communities. VCCA Fellows have received worldwide attention through publications, exhibitions, compositions, performances, and major awards and accolades, including MacArthur grants, Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts awards, Rome Prizes, Pollock-Krasner grants, National Book Awards, Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, and Academy Award Nominations. A non-profit organization founded in 1971, the VCCA is supported in large part by grants and private donations.
Hinnefeld has published fiction, poetry, and essays in print and online journals. Her book of short stories, Tell Me Everything (1998)—called "a beautiful and wise collection, with no wasted words" by judge Joanna Scott—received the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction. Her first published novel, In Hovering Flight (2008), was chosen by IndieBound, the American Association of Independent Booksellers, as its top pick nationwide for the month the book was released. For more information on Hinnefeld and her work, visit www.InHoveringFlight.com.