Bakopoulos Receives 2016 NEA Fellowship

His second fellowship, this time for creative nonfiction

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has awarded individual creative writing fellowships of $25,000 each to 37 fiction and creative nonfiction writers, including Dean Bakopoulos, writer-in-residence at Grinnell College. 

Dean Bakopoulos headshot

The NEA selected Bakopoulos from among 1,763 eligible applicants evaluated by 23 readers and panelists. This is his second NEA fellowship, a rare accomplishment. Fellows must wait 10 years before applying for a second fellowship. Bakopoulos won an award for fiction in 2006; the 2016 award is for creative nonfiction.

“I’m so grateful to the NEA for recognizing my work for a second time,” Bakopoulos says. “This is an important boost for me on many levels, not just financially, but also emotionally. I’m finishing a difficult and somewhat perplexing book, and this fellowship has given me the courage to keep working, to finish the manuscript I was very close to throwing away.

“The nonfiction manuscript, titled Undoings, is a book-length meditation on the way things fall apart, and how we, as individuals, as families, as artists, often become undone by our own obsessions and our own pasts. I wrestle with many demons and blessings in that book: marriage, divorce, and parenthood; my own family’s history as war refugees and the long shadows cast by war trauma; as well as everything from country music to fast food to the role of religion in clinical depression. Right now, it’s a mess of a book, and this fellowship gives me the time to give it the focus it needs.” 

Bakopoulos, who teaches fiction and creative nonfiction courses at Grinnell, is the author of three novels — Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, My American Unhappiness, and Summerlong. The film version of his first novel, co-written by Bakopoulos, wrapped shooting in January and stars James Franco, Rashida Jones, and Jeffrey Wahlberg. The film version of Summerlong, also adapted by Bakopoulos, is in the works. In addition to his two NEA awards, Bakopoulos is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship. 

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