Poet Jennifer Grotz, a professor of English, has been named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2017, one of just 11 poets to be recognized among this year’s honorees. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, one of the leading philanthropic foundations for individual scholars and artists, announced the list of 173 fellowship winners—out of more than 3,000 applicants—on April 7.
The fellowships were awarded to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists, on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Twenty members of the current Rochester faculty have received Guggenheim Fellowships, which are among the most coveted academic awards. The fellowship, established in 1925, is designed to provide creative freedom and support recipients “in any manner they deem necessary to their work.”
The author of four volumes of poetry—including The Needle (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) and Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016)—Grotz has published her poems in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, among other publications. She’s also a literary translator, with two books translated from French—Rochester Knockings (Open Letter Books, 2015) and Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon, 2013)—and other translations from French and Polish, published in a variety of journals and anthologies.
“Jennifer Grotz’s poetry is reflective and keenly observant,” says Rosemary Kegl, chair of the Department of English. “She inspires our students to cultivate their own capacities to see and describe, to develop the attentiveness that characterizes her own work.”
Grotz is the assistant director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a legendary program for writers in Ripton, Vermont. Her previous awards include the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, in 2014, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation, in 2015. She’s also the poetry editor of Open Letter Books, the University’s literary translation press.
A native of Texas, Grotz earned a bachelor’s degree at Tulane University, a master of fine arts degree at Indiana University, and a PhD at the University of Houston. She has been a member of Rochester’s faculty since 2009 and teaches courses in poetry, creative writing, and translation studies.
For more on Jennifer Grotz:
- Opening a Window: poet Jennifer Grotz reflects on place, inspiration, and the ‘vocabulary’ she found in a baroque French monastery
- A Slice of Life at Bread Loaf: poet Jennifer Grotz helps lead a legendary writers’ retreat
