Mayapple Center Offers Scholarships to Study with Pulitzer Winner Vijay Seshadri

Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities

The Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities, a nonprofit center in Stamford, Connecticut, is offering two half-scholarships to study with Vijay Seshadri, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The class is called Transitions and Transfigurations and runs from August 18 — August 22 on Mayapple’s campus.
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The focus of this weeklong workshop in the rhetoric of nonfiction prose writing—which will be understood as encompassing everything from personal essays and memoirs to high-end literary journalism to lyric essays of the sort that obliterate the distinction between nonfiction and poetry on the one hand and nonfiction and fiction on the other. Students will examine the ways in which prose is made to move and develop and create meaning and feeling through that movement, as well as read and dissect essays and memoir fragments by writers ranging from Nabokov, Orwell, Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to contemporaries such as Anne Carson, Vivian Gornick, and John D’Agata.
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Vijay Seshadri is the author of the collections Wild KingdomThe Long MeadowThe Disappearances,and 3 Sections, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His essays, reviews, and memoir fragments have appeared in periodicals such as The New YorkerThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Threepenny ReviewThe American ScholarVerse, and in the anthologies The Anchor Essay Annual—Best Essays of 1998 and Best Creative Nonfiction (2008). A former editor at The New Yorker, he is currently the Michele Tolela Myers Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was for over a decade the director of the college’s nonfiction writing program. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and a MFA from Columbia University and has received grants from the New York Foundation from the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the James Laughlin Award.
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The Mayapple Center cultivates imagination through artistic and intellectual cross-pollination in a distinctly 21st century climate. The Center is dedicated to sustainability and its serene lake and peaceful landscape of trees and gardens serve as a retreat to inspire its residents. Activities such as swimming, tennis, canoeing, yoga and meditation promote a strong sense of community among residents, with an emphasis on mindfulness. Meals are partially prepared from organic produce from Mayapple gardens, and locally-sourced food is served at every meal.
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If interested in applying for the scholarship, please send an email inquiry to michelle.slater@mayapplecenter.org with your CV and writing sample immediately. The program cost is $1,200 and each scholarship is for $600. You can find out more about the program here.