Past Cheuse Fellows

The Cheuse Fellowship supports the vision of Alan Cheuse to build travel into the experience of students who grew up in Virginia. Our first fellows went abroad in 2017. Read more about our fellows by year, but also read their work on their return, "In Another Country." Titled after the James Baldwin book, "Another Country," which he wrote in Istanbul, the series captures the trips taken by Cheuse Fellows across the world.

As time has gone by the Cheuse Fellowships have begun to include international students, students in different cultural diaspora, as well as American students from across the United States. This shift reflects the growing interest in the Mason MFA globally. It also links Alan Cheuse more directly to the fellowship. As the son of a Ukrainian (then Russian) engineer in Stalin's army who defected to the United States, Alan Cheuse wrote "Fall out of Heaven", a powerful travel memoir about his father's origins in Ukraine. The Cheuse Center's multiple Ukraine literature programs in 2023, and appearance at the Kyiv Book Fair in the winter of 2023, gave audiences a chance to see Ukraine from the eyes of a first generation Ukrainian American, Alan Cheuse.