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

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.

Image

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 Ondaatje, and international policy-makers such as Mary Robinson and Montek Ahluwalia.

“In the time I’ve been at UMass, I’ve been deeply grateful to the vision of the greater school, as well as to my department and program for the inspired students and colleagues I’ve felt lucky to get to know,” says Meidav. “UMass demonstrates its support for research in so many meaningful ways, helping make pathways available to staff, community members, students, and faculty. Considering just this past year, I was happy to teach and mentor graduate students, teach my first undergraduate class, work with local prisons, be a climate fellow at the Institute for Genocide, Holocaust, and Memory Studies, serve as a Fulbright mentor, and begin collaborating with a musician and architect-artist on a futuring conference. These are just a few examples of the way that UMass offers a strong core so everyone connected to it can reach outward. Every institution balances tradition and innovation, yet some kind of magic inheres within UMass and its creation of such a wonderful seedbed, such cross-pollination.”

Called an "American original" by The Daily Beast, Meidav is the author of “Another Love Discourse;” “Kingdom of the Young;” “Lola, California;” “Crawl Space;” and “The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon.”

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, Fundacíon Valparaíso, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, VCCA, Norton Island Residency, 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 spoken and led creative and restorative justice workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in California, the Home for Cooperation in Cyprus, in Sri Lanka, 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.