On Tuesday, Literary Arts named Linfield professor Joe Wilkins one of two 2024 Oregon Literary Career Fellowship recipients. With the fellowship comes $10,000 and one of the most prestigious literary honors in the Pacific Northwest.
Wilkins, who serves as chair of the English department, director of the creative writing program and a member of the environmental studies faculty, has taught at Linfield since the fall of 2013. While this is his first Oregon Literary Fellowship, his work is widely celebrated. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an Oregon Book Award for “When We Were Birds,” a poetry collection, in 2017.
Reached at his office in T.J. Day on Tuesday, Wilkins said that the award was meaningful on multiple levels.
“A fellowship like this is professionally validating — it means your peers, other professional writers out there, have looked at your work and determined it deserves support, recognition and a place in the larger conversation,” he said.
Per the Literary Arts website, the selection process involves out-of-state judges who spend “several months evaluating these applications, using literary excellence as the primary criterion.”
While the application itself is short, Wilkins said, “the real bulk of it is a writing sample, a selection from your recent work, that’s where most of the discussion happens as they read.”
He submitted two short stories, “Every Moment Shines, When You Cut It Open,” originally published in literary journal Moss, and “Enough of Me,” which appeared in High Desert Journal.
“I was thinking I’d do a selection from my upcoming novel, but I wanted something that closed in on itself,” he said.
He is grateful, he added, for the award itself and the freedom that comes with the stipend.
“It’s a chance to travel a little further in the summer as I work on projects, and it ultimately gives me more time to keep writing, which is always what you’re after as a writer,” he said.
Since it began in 1987, Literary Arts has given more than $1 million in fellowships and awards to over 700 Oregon writers and publishers. This year, the program received 587 fellowship applications and awarded $55,000 to ten writers and two publishers.
Wilkins shares the Literary Careers Fellowship distinction with Eric Simons. Simons is a “writer, improviser, teacher, producer and CoolDad™” who helms Kickstand’s BIPOC Comedy Program.
Wilkins’ next book, “The Entire Sky,” is out July 2 through Hachette Book Group. Upcoming events include the Local Author Fair at the McMinnville Public Library on Feb. 24 and “Pubs and Profs,” a Linfield alumni gathering at Portland’s Lucky Labrador Beer Hall on Feb. 28. His talk, entitled “Language, Memory, Story: From the Poem to the Novel”, examines different genres of writing and what they offer both writer and reader. He will also appear at the Oregon Book Awards Ceremony on April 8.
