Doctoral Student Joshua Mehigan (English) Named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow

Doctoral student Joshua Mehigan (English) has been named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Appointed on the basis of "prior achievement and exceptional promise," Mehigan joins 174 winning candidates selected from a pool of more than 3,100 applicants.

His first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP), was a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His second, Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was cited in the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere as a best book of 2014.

Mehigan's poems have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and several anthologies.

Mehigan currently teaches English and creative writing at the College of Staten Island and works as a workshop instructor for Brooklyn Poets, a literary nonprofit.

Established in 1925, Guggenheim Fellowships reward those who "have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts," according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Watch a short video about Mehigan.