Elisabeth Benjamin of Lubec and Mark Rowland of Naples are the 2010 winners of Martin Dibner fellowships in fiction. The Maine Community Foundation awards the fellowships annually to promising Maine writers seeking to develop their writing skills.
A graduate of the University of Missouri, Benjamin received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana in 2007. Her short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Meridian, Black Warrior Review and DIAGRAM. The Dibner award will help cover living expenses while Benjamin completes her first collection of stories.
Rowland is studying English and creative writing at the University of Southern Maine where he is currently fiction editor for Words & Images, USM’s arts and literature journal. He received the Richard W. Carbonneau Jr. Scholarship to attend the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference last year. Rowland hopes to attend a writers’ retreat using his Dibner fellowship award.
This year’s judges were Ellen Booraem and David Fickett. Booraem is the author of The Unnameables (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books), which was a Junior Library Guild selection. Her second book, Small Persons with Wings, is due out in spring 2011. David Fickett is the author of Nectar (St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan). His short stories have appeared in Puckerbrush Review, The Peninsula Review and Wilmington Blues.
The Dibner fellowship alternates between fiction and poetry. Next year’s deadline, for poets, is January 15, 2011. Guidelines can be found at www.mainecf.org or by calling toll free 1-877-700-6800.
Novelist and historian Martin Dibner served on the Maine Arts Commission and was the first director of the Payson Gallery at Westbrook College. Several friends created this fund to honor Dibner’s contributions to the art of writing. Read more about the Martin Dibner Fellowship for Maine Writers
March 11, 2010