English Professor Edie Meidav Chosen as Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Fellow

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English Professor Edie Meidav has been selected as a fellow by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to further her work by writing a book this summer. As part of the fellowship, she will spend one month on the 50-acre property located at the heart of Lake Como in Northern Italy. 

Each year, the Bellagio residency program offers up to 100 best-in-class practitioners, scholars, writers, policy makers and artists from around the world for these month-long residencies to advance their work and engage with a globally diverse community of residents. Former residents include Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, renowned authors Maya Angelou and Michael Ondaatji, and international policy makers such as Mary Robinson and Montek Ahluwalia. 

Called an "American original" by The Daily Beast, Meidav is the author of “Kingdom of the Young” (Sarabande, 2017); “Lola, California” (Farrar Straus, 2011/12); “Crawl Space” (Farrar Straus, 2006/7); and “The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon” (Houghton, Mifflin, 2000/1).  

Her career has been supported by fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Bard Fiction Prize for a writer under 40, creative Fulbrights for work in Sri Lanka and Cyprus, and residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, Fundacion Valparaiso, Vermont Studio Center, Art/OMI and elsewhere.  

In addition, Meidav’s work has been called an editors' pick by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and more. She has served as a judge for the PEN/Bingham first novel award, the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Juniper Prize, Yaddo, and as an editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal as well as a contributing editor at the International Literary Quarterly, while continuing as a senior editor at Conjunctions. She has taught or spoken at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in California, the Home for Cooperation in Cyprus, and elsewhere.  

Within the UMass Amherst MFA for poets and writers program, she is the founder of Radius, a project linking NEPR, the MFA, and undertold stories from diverse populations in western Massachusetts.