Beth Nguyen wasn’t sure what it meant when she got a mysterious email from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation last month. But Nguyen, the Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and Director of the Master’s in Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, got her answer last week: She has been selected as one of 188 artists and creators to receive a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship.
“I’m still completely overwhelmed,” says Nguyen, the author of multiple works of fiction and non-fiction. “The fellowship provides a new way for me to think about my own work, perhaps with the kind of scope that I hadn’t previously allowed myself to consider. It’s a real sense of validation.”
The fellowship will enable Nguyen to spend the 2024–2025 academic year working on her next book project: A work she’s tentatively calling Estuary. It’s a series of non-fiction stories she’s planning to write about natural disasters and their effects, including impact craters — areas where meteorites have struck the Earth and left behind deep indentations.
“One of the things I want to explore in this book is narrative itself and how we tell stories about our lives, our relationships, our families and pasts,” Nguyen explains. “I’m connecting that idea of narrative with geological landscapes, in particular focusing on landscapes of disaster.”
Nguyen has already visited the largest visible impact crater in the United States — the Barringer Crater, located in Arizona about 40 miles east of Flagstaff.
“It’s privately owned, which is weird, and there’s a whole interesting history as to how that came to be,” she says. “For me, it engages questions about the idea of ownership, and about our relationship with land, history, and place. We’re actually surrounded by impact craters all over the Midwest. We just don’t know it.”
The last year has been momentous for Nguyen. In July 2023, she published Owner of a Lonely Heart, her second work of non-fiction, a critically acclaimed memoir of her life as a young Vietnamese refugee who migrated to the United States and didn’t meet her mother until she was 19. Nguyen is also the author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and two fictional works, Short Girls, which won a 2010 American Book Award, and Pioneer Girl.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will allow Nguyen to build on her creative momentum. She is deeply grateful to the Foundation — and for the support she has received from her department.
“One of the wonderful things about getting fellowship support is that this is a way to challenge myself to do something new, something different,” she says. “And to me, that is the heart of research.”
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925, to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals. That list includes Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, E.E. Cummings and Linus Pauling.