Current Fellow 2015-2016

 
Kathleen Winter and Nan Cuba have been awarded the 2015-2016 Dobie Paisano writing fellowships sponsored by the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.

The fellowships allow writers to spend four to six months at the Paisano Ranch, J. Frank Dobie’s 254-acre retreat west of Austin, now owned and maintained by The University of Texas at Austin. The fellowships provide solitude, time and a comfortable place for Texas writers or writers who have written significantly about Texas.

Kathleen Winter is the author of Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press), winner of the Antivenom Poetry Prize and the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award for a first book of poems.  Her poems have appeared in journals including Tin House, AGNI, Poetry London, Gulf Coast, The New Republic, Cincinnati Review and Field.  She was awarded fellowships by the James Merrill House Foundation; the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France; Cill Rialaig Retreat, Ireland; and Vermont Studio Center. Her book manuscript “Tonic” won the 2014 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize from Marsh Hawk Press.

Winter grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University in 2011.  She graduated with honors from the University of California, Davis, School of Law, and holds an MA in English Literature from Boston College and BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin.  She lives with her husband Greg Campbell in Sonoma County, California, and teaches at Napa Valley College.

Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread (Engine Books, 2013), winner of the PEN Southwest Award in Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction; it was also listed as one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine, was a “Summer Books” choice from Huffington Post, and the San Antonio Express-News called it one of the “Best Books of 2013.”  Cuba co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008), and published other work in such places as Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Columbia, and Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row.  Her story, “Watching Alice Watch,” was one of the Million Writers Award Notable Stories (storySouth), and “When Horses Fly” won the George Nixon Creative Writing Award for Best Prose from the Conference of College Teachers of English.  As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine. She received an artist residency at Fundación Valparaiso in Spain and was a finalist for the Humanities Texas Award for Individual Achievement.  She is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center (www.geminiink.org), and teaches in the MA/MFA Program in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where she is writer-in-residence.  Her website is http://nancuba.com.