UC Santa Cruz literature professor Nathaniel Mackey has been awarded a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry.
Mackey is one of 180 creative artists, scientists, and scholars selected this year by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from a group of 3,000 applicants.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The program considers applications in a wide variety of fields, ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts.
A poet, literary critic, fiction writer, and journal editor, Mackey has produced a wide variety of work over the past three decades that has earned him national and international recognition.
In 2006, Mackey was honored with a National Book Award in the poetry category for his book Splay Anthem. He received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1993 and was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2001, one of the highest honors in the field of poetry.
Mackey's books of poetry include Four for Trane, Septet for the End of Time, Outlantish, and Song of the Andoumboulou, which are widely regarded as among the most innovative examples of contemporary American experimental writing.
Mackey graduated with high honors in English from Princeton University in 1969 and completed his Ph.D at Stanford. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California, where he directed the Black Studies Program, before joining the UCSC faculty in 1979.
