The Cheuse Center is pleased and proud to announce the recipients of the inaugural Cheuse Center Travel Research Grants for this summer.
Sam Ashworth (second year, MFA in fiction) and Liesel Hamilton (second year, MFA in nonfiction) are the recipients. Sam will spend time in the Luberon and Lyon regions of France, training as a chef for a novel he is working on called "The Dissection." Liesel will travel to Germany and Poland to research a project about familial and cultural history and memory. Both Sam and Liesel will receive $5,000 to further research on these ongoing creative projects.
Samuel Ashworth's fiction and essays have been published in Catapult and Barrelhouse (Spring 2017). He is a regular book reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and his work has also appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Roads and Kingdoms, and Bookslut. Born and raised in Manhattan, he attended Trinity College Dublin before receiving his B.A. from Columbia University.He is currently in his second year of the MFA in fiction program, where in his first year he was awarded the Dan Rudy and Mary Roberts Rinehart prizes for fiction. He was recently a fellow at the TENT Creative Writing Seminars, where he studied with Josh Lambert and Eileen Pollack. He lives in Washington, DC, and is working on a novel about the life and death of an American chef, told through his autopsy.
Liesel Hamilton currently lives in Northern Virginia where she is completing her MFA in creative nonfiction. She was recently awarded Mason’s 2017-2018 Thesis Fellowship and is the co-author of Wild South Carolina: A Field Guide to Parks, Preserves and Special Places, published through Hub City Press. In February 2017, she was a panelist at Deckle Edge: South Carolina’s Literary Festival where she discussed nature writing.Liesel is a certified naturalist in South Carolina and uses her love of nature and writing to regularly contribute to a nature column for the Midlands Master Naturalist Association. Her work has also appeared in the collaborative chapbook Poetry on the COMET and Fall Lines, where she received the Broad River Prize for Prose. Liesel often writes essays about southern identity and is currently working on a series of essays concerning her grandmother’s post-WWII experiences.
We received numerous wonderful applications for these awards. Our heartfelt thanks to those who applied and also to Solon Simmons, vice president for global strategy, and Kathryn Agoston, director of graduate fellowships, who reviewed applications with Cheuse Center director Matthew Davis.
Congratulations to Sam and Liesel!
March 21, 2017
