Two Sarah Lawrence College Professors Receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Sarah Lawrence College faculty members Victoria Redel and Rachel Cohen have been honored with Guggenheim Fellowships. Redel, who has taught Creative Writing at SLC since 1996, received the award for fiction. Cohen, who has taught Creative Writing at SLC since 2003, received the award for general nonfiction. Additionally, two SLC Alumni have been recognized. Eva Kittay ’67 received the award for philosophy, while Rashaun Mitchell ’00 received the award for choreography. Fellows are selected on the basis of distinguished past achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Fellowships were awarded to 178 artists, scholars and, scientists selected from over 3,000 applicants in the ninetieth competition of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Decisions are based on recommendations from expert advisors and are approved by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

The Guggenheim Fellowship program is unique in its wide range of interests, age, geography, and institution of those it selects, as it considers applications in 56 different fields from the natural sciences to the creative arts. Fellows who are writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities represent more than 83 institutions.

Victoria Redel is the author of the novels The Border of Truth (2008) and Loverboy (2001), and two collections of short fiction: Make Me Do Things (2014) and Where the Road Bottoms Out (1995). She is also the author of three award-winning collections of poetry: Woman Without Umbrella(2013), Swoon (2003), and Already the World (1995). Her debut novel, Loverboy, was awarded the S. Mariella Novel Award, the Foreward fiction prize, selected as a Borders Original Voice, a Los Angeles Times Best Book and was adapted for a feature-length film released in 2006. Redel’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been widely anthologized and translated into six languages. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Granta.com, Guernica, Salmagundi, NOON, Elle, and Harvard Review. Additionally, Redel is a recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Tom and Stan Wick Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award.

Rachel Cohen is an essayist and cultural critic, who writes about history, literature, and the arts. Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Times,Threepenny Review, Believer, and McSweeney’s, and have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and in Best American Essays. Cohen’s first book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (Random House, 2004), is a series of thirty-six linked essays about the encounters among thirty figures in American literary and cultural history during the century from the Civil War through the civil-rights movement. A Chance Meeting won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was named a notable book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and by Maureen Corrigan on National Public Radio. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and has had fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.

Eva Kittay received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her first works in philosophy were in the philosophy of language, publishing Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Clarendon Press, Oxford UP). Her pioneering work interjecting questions of care and disability (especially cognitive disability) into philosophy, and her work in feminist theory have garnered a number of honors and prizes: 2003 Woman Philosopher of the Year by the Society for Women in Philosophy, the inaugural prize of the Institut de Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft, the Lebowitz prize from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Discovery, and an NEH Fellowship.

Rashaun Mitchell started his dance training at Concord Academy and graduated with a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Since then he has worked with many dance artists including Chantal Yzermans, Donna Uchizono, Pam Tanowitz, Risa Jaroslow, Sara Rudner, Jonah Bokaer, Richard Colton, Deborah Hay, Rebecca Lazier, Silas Riener, and Merce Cunningham (2004-2012). He is a Cunningham Fellow, licensed stager of the repertory and is currently on faculty at Tisch School of the Arts. His choreography has been presented in NYC by Danspace Project, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La Mama Moves Festival, Mount Tremper Arts, Skirball Center at NYU, Museum of Arts and Design and at numerous festivals and universities throughout the East Coast. With Silas Riener, he was listed in Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" for 2013, and is a member of LMCC's inaugural Extended Life Dance Development Program.