Schenectady, N.Y. (April 27, 1999) – Mikhail Iossel, writer-in-residence at Union College, joins a distinguished group of Union faculty as a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is one of eight Guggenheim Fellows in fiction this year.
Iossel is nearing completion of a book of two novellas linked by common characters. One, written in the past, is set in Russia. The other, written in the present, is set in the United States.
Iossel also has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board, the Wallace Stegner Foundation, and the Henfield Foundation/Transatlantic Review Board.
Two of this works – “Bologoye” and “Every Hunter Wants to Know” – were selected for the Best American Short Stories anthology in 1991.
Iossel received his master's in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire at Durham and served as the Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction writing at Stanford University. At native of St. Petersburg, Russia, he received his bachelor's degree and his master's in engineering from the Leningrad Institute of Shipbuilding, and received a certificate in journalism, writing, theory and translation from Leningrad State University.
He has also held teaching posts at the University of Minnesota, the New School for Social Research, New York University and St. Lawrence University. He is organizer this summer of the Summer Literary Seminars, an advanced writing workshop in St. Petersburg.
Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to give blocks of time to fellows to pursue their work with creative freedom. Other Union faculty members who have been Guggenheim Fellows include Chris Duncan and the late Daniel Robbins, visual arts; Jordan Smith, English; Robert Wells, history; and Brenda Wineapple, English.