PLAINFIELD, VT: Goddard College is pleased to congratulate Jaimie Li, recipient of the 2019 Goddard/PEN North American Centers Scholarship, and second-place awardee Domenick Danza.
Jaimie Li is a member of PEN America and an alumna of Balliol College at Oxford University, where she received a BA in Jurisprudence in 2011. She has worked in film music financing and in arts fundraising and development at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Her writing has appeared in Darling Magazine and Poetry Northwest. In 2017, her fiction was nominated for the Allegra Johnson Prize in Novel Writing at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
As a student in Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, she plans to explore “the interplay of the subliminal and the liminal, especially as they pertain to memory and personal identity.” Her fiction revolves around issues of diaspora, mental health, religion and race. “I believe,” she says, “that the more creative voices emerge out of any particular demographic, the less weight there is on any one to represent the entire group, and the more unique each of their perspectives become.”
Elena Georgiou, Director of Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, described Ms.. Li’s work as “brave and vivid. Her style is spare and elegant, and she approaches her themes of identity, ethnicity, and trauma with rare intelligence and uncommon insight.”
The $10,000 Goddard/PEN North American Scholarship is the result of a partnership between Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing and PEN America, PEN Canada, and PEN Mexico, which together comprise the North American branches of PEN International, the world’s preeminent literary organization. Members at any level from these PEN Centers are eligible for the Goddard/PEN North American Scholarship.
The second-place awardee, playwright Domenick Danza, is also a member of PEN America. He teaches drama and theatre at Sunset Park School (PS 169) in Brooklyn, NY. His short plays have been a part of Chicago Dramatists Ten-Minute Workshops, Circle Theater’s New Works Festivals, The Second City Training Center, and VoiceTheatre’s 10-Minute Play Festival.
Three additional scholarship candidates will receive Engaged Artist Awards of $2,000 each: PEN America members Miriam Tobin, Mason Langston, and Melissa Shekinah.
About Goddard College
The mission of Goddard College is to advance cultures of rigorous inquiry, collaboration, and lifelong learning, where individuals take imaginative and responsible action in the world. Goddard College offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in a number of disciplines. Founded in 1976, Goddard’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program was the first of its kind in the nation. The low-residency program is offered at campuses in Plainfield, Vermont, and Port Townsend, Washington. It is a 48-credit, student-centered program ideal for students with family, work, or personal obligations who choose to hone their writing skills while maintaining their other commitments. The program regularly hosts luminaries from the theater and film industries and the publishing trade, and conducts a Visiting Writers Series and Visiting Alumni Writers Series as well. For more information, please visit: www.goddard.edu/academics/master-fine-arts-creative-writing-2/
