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Lisa Olstein MFA '03 and Susan Steinberg MFA '00 have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for 2020.

Lisa Olstein is the author of Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020)—a book-length lyric essay exploring the intersection of pain, perception, language, and gender—and four poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press, most recently, Late Empire. Her honors include a Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Essay Press Chapbook Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum.  A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite, fronted by acclaimed songwriter Jeffrey Foucault. Previously, she co-founded and for ten years directed the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she also served as associate director of the MFA program.

Susan Steinberg is the author of four books of fiction, Machine (Graywolf), Spectacle (Graywolf), Hydroplane (FC2),and The End of Free Love (FC2).  Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Zyzzyva, Bomb online, The Believer online, Boulevard, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, and other literary journals.  She has been the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and the Pushcart Prize.  She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Civitella Ranieri Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the James Merrill House, the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Jentel, Blue Mountain Center and Ledig House.  She earned a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She is Professor of English at the University of San Francisco and was the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Creative Nonfiction Program at the University of Iowa.