Baldwin receives National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

NEA Logo and photo of Jamaica Baldwin

May 4, 2021 by Erin Chambers

Poet and Ph.D. student Jamaica Baldwin is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship, which the NEA announced in February as part of its first round of FY 2021 arts funding. These fellowships—which each come with an award of $25,000 to support writing, travel, research, and general career advancement—are very competitive: of the 1,601 eligible applicants this year, only 35 winners were chosen. Baldwin is the second member of the Department of English to receive an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in recent years, after poet and Assistant Professor Hope Wabuke, who received her NEA fellowship in 2017.

Jamaica Baldwin grew up in Santa Cruz, CA. She earned her B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Pacific University before coming to UNL. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in English with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry), African Diasporan Literature, and Women and Gender Studies. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, Guernica, The Adroit Journal, World Literature Today, The Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly, among others.

The NEA Creative Writing Fellowship is just one of many accolades she has received this year; she won the 2021 RHINO Editor's Prize for her poem “Father Weaver,” and was awarded the inaugural Sunita Jain Literary Award for Excellence in Poetry in the UNL Department of English. She is the 2019 winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Contest in Poetry, and was a runner-up for the 2020 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize. Her work has been supported by Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers Program.

To learn more about Jamaica Baldwin and her poetry, visit her website.