KHN Alum (2010) Theodore Wheeler (Ted) has been awarded a 2020 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (see press release below), and his third book, In Our Other Lives, will be published by Little A in early March 2020. Links to the full list of NEA Literature Fellowship awards, a link to purchase his newest book, and Ted's Lives Radio Show interview with fellow KHN Alum (2018) Stuart Chittenden, are included below.
Theodore Wheeler Receives National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing
Fellowship
OMAHA—Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Theodore
Wheeler is one of 36 writers who will receive an FY 2020 Creative Writing
Fellowship of $25,000. These fellowships enable the recipients to set aside
time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Fellows
are selected through a highly-competitive, anonymous process and are judged
on the artistic excellence of the work sample provided.
“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support our nation’s
writers, including Theodore Wheeler, and the artistry, creativity, and
dedication that go into their work,” said Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Theodore Wheeler was selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants.
Fellowships alternate between poetry and prose each year and this year’s
fellowships are to support prose writers.
Theodore Wheeler is author of the novels In Our Other Lives (Little A, March
3, 2020) and Kings of Broken Things (Little A, 2017), and a collection of
short stories, Bad Faith (Queens Ferry Press, 2016). He has been recognized
with a Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, a fellowship
from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, and was a resident at
the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in 2010. A graduate of the
creative writing program at Creighton University, Wheeler teaches at the
University of Nebraska at Omaha, covers a civil-law and politics beat for a
national news service, co-directs Omaha Lit Fest, and sidelines as a
bookseller for the Dundee Book Company roving book cart, one of the world’s
smallest bookstores.
An excerpt from Wheeler's new novel, In Our Other Lives, was featured in his
winning application. The novel will be published on March 3.
Since 1967, the Arts Endowment has awarded more than 3,500 Creative Writing
Fellowships totaling over $55 million. Many American recipients of the
National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize
in Poetry and Fiction were recipients of National Endowment for the Arts
fellowships early in their careers.
Visit the agency’s Literature Fellowships webpage to read excerpts by and
features on past Creative Writing Fellows and recipients of Literature
Fellowships for translation projects. For more information on literature at
the National Endowment for the Arts, go to arts.gov.
Congratulations, Ted!
Photo credit: Theodore Wheeler headshot by Patrick Mainelli