George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program associate professor Vivek Narayanan and alumna Jessica Anthony, MFA ’04, have been named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows.
Narayanan was recognized in the poetry category while Anthony was honored for fiction. The duo were two of 223 individuals representing 10 countries who were awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which is celebrating its 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows.
The Guggenheim Foundation has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in fellowships to more than 19,000 notable individuals, many of whom have gone on to win other prestigious awards, such as the Nobel Prize, the Turing Award, the Fields Medal, and the National Book Award.
Narayanan and Anthony join Creative Writing associate professor Tania James and Sally Keith as recent Guggenheim Fellows from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS).
James, also in the Creative Writing Program, was named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow for fiction. Keith, from the Department of English, was the first CHSS professor to be named a Guggenheim Fellow when she received it for poetry in 2018-19.
“The Guggenheim Fellowship is a well-deserved and impressive honor,” Department of English Chair Tamara Harvey said. “That two faculty members and one alumna from George Mason’s MFA program in Creative Writing have received Guggenheims in the past two years speaks to the strengths of a highly regarded program that never rests on its laurels.”
Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S, After, and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror. In addition to teaching in the MFA program, Narayanan is a Co-Editorial Director of the George Mason-housed digital journal Poetry Daily and sits on the board of the Cheuse International Writers Center. He was also recently named a 2026 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow for the translation of his project “The Kuruntokai: A Poet’s Annotated Translation of a Legendary Ancient Tamil Anthology.”
Anthony, a senior lecturer at Bates College in Maine, is the author of several books, with her most recent novel, The Most (2024), being longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction. In addition, she is the author of The Convalescent (2009), winner of McSweeney’s inaugural Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award; Chopsticks (2012), a collaboration with designer Rodrigo Corral; and Enter the Aardvark (2020), which was a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and New American Writing.
“It is beyond exciting to hear not one, but two members of our Creative Writing Program received this prestigious fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation,” College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Ann Ardis said. “The Guggenheim Foundation celebrates those who show ‘exceptional promise,’ and we couldn’t be happier for Vivek and Jessica, who continue to inspire their peers, students, and readers.”