Mikhail Iossel, writer-in-residence, joins a distinguished group of
faculty as the latest recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is one of eight Guggenheim Fellows in fiction this year.
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.
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 in Best American Short Stories 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. 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.