Explore

The Joan Beebe Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship brings a graduate of Warren Wilson's nationally acclaimed MFA Program for Writers to campus for a year to teach undergraduate composition and creative writing classes. The Fellowship is named for the beloved former Dean of the College who aided the MFA Program's move to Warren Wilson in 1981 (it had been founded at Goddard College, in Vermont, in 1976). Then-program director Michelle Simons, program founder and Academic Board Chair Ellen Bryant Voigt, and program alumna-turned-faculty member Joan Aleshire all cite Joan Beebe's influence as key to the graduate program's successful transplanting.

The first Joan Beebe Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship was awarded in 1997 to poet Laura Newbern. Since then, the position has been held by a variety of writers, many of whom have gone on to great success as writers and as teachers. They include Elizabeth Arnold, A. Van Jordan, Richard Schmitt, Emilie White, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Valerie Bandura, Gary Lilley, Christine Hale, and 2008-2009 Fellow Justin Gardiner.