Full Stop, an online journal of literary and cultural criticism established in 2011, invites applications for two Full Stop Fellows. These 6-month long fellowships are intended to facilitate the research and writing of emerging critics on an extended, open-ended project investigating some aspect of contemporary literary culture, broadly construed. Fellows will publish in-progress pieces of this project on Full Stop’s website in the form of short blog posts, book reviews, interviews, long-form essays, audio or visual media, hybrid genres etc. As a culmination of the fellowship, Fellows will organize an event and/or create an e-publication, as dictated by the project itself. Full Stop Fellows will each be awarded a stipend of $1,500.
Full Stop’s mission is to support the work of critics, small presses, and the aesthetically, linguistically, and socially marginalized communities of writers they represent. We strive to engage with the significant changes occurring in the publishing industry and the evolution of print media by promoting writing on the kind of literature that is less well accounted for in other outlets: small press books — especially prose, works by emerging writers, and works in translation. This is because Full Stop’s editors and contributors know that the transforming publishing and media landscape of the 21st century requires pushing approaches to contemporary literature beyond those established by the big newspaper book review sections of the mid-20th century or the proliferation of literary blogs that marked its end. Not content to add another voice to the fray clamoring to canonize a publishing behemoth’s next great American novel, we currently publish more long-form literary reviews of books published by small and academic presses than any other website or physical publication, providing visibility for books that often receive either minimal coverage or no coverage at all from corporate and mainstream outlets. Our reviews and interviews are important resources on contemporary small press literature, as they are often the only extended engagement with a given book or author that can be found. Our feature, interview, and blog sections supplement this core content, serving as fora for extended critical writing and conversation unbound from any obligation to timeliness. Work published in these sections often experiments with and extends the limits of non-fiction forms such as literary criticism, reportage, personal essay, archival research, and profile.
We seek Fellows who are curious, conflicted, concerned, critical, thoughtful, and excited about literary production and reception in our current moment and who are looking for a platform to explore further and share their ideas with others. And we look for proposals of imaginative projects that will investigate pressing questions about contemporary literature and culture and experiment with the forms that public literary criticism and engagement can take. Applicants need not have graduate school credentials or previously published writing in major media outlets. In keeping with Full Stop’s commitment to highlighting the unknown, precarious, and as-yet unrealized of contemporary culture, we particularly encourage applications for projects that will feature marginalized voices and perspectives.
During the six-month fellowship, Full Stop Fellows will:
- Produce a minimum of 3-5 pieces documenting their project in progress, to be published online at Full Stop. These pieces can take a variety of forms: blog posts, book reviews, interviews, audio and visual media, hybrid genres etc.
- Produce at least 1-2 long-form essays to be published in the Full Stop Quarterly or newsletter.
- Create a final product for the project in the form of an event and or e-publication. This may incorporate the writing completed and published during the course of the fellowship.
- Work in close collaboration with the Full Stop editorial collective, receiving mentorship and support in producing, shaping, editing, and promoting writing and final project.
- Receive a $1,500 stipend for the 6-month fellowship
To Apply:
Please send 1) a short bio, 2) a non-academic writing sample (1,000-3,000 words), preferably previously written (though not necessarily previously published) on some aspect of literature and culture, and 3) a 300-500 word description of the project you envision undertaking as a Full Stop Fellow. The project description should include an explanation of the questions that will motivate your project, an outline of how you plan to use Full Stop as a platform to document the progress of your project, and the final form that you hope the project will take. We intend for these projects to be exploratory and iterative, so we understand that they may evolve and change as you continue to work on the project in close collaboration with Full Stop‘s editors.
All materials must be submitted to [email protected] by the end of the day May 19 for consideration. Fellows will be announced in June 2019.
The Full Stop Fellows program is supported by a grant from CLMP. Please help us continue to offer these fellowships in the coming years by donating here. If you are an organization or academic department interested in opportunities to sponsor a future Full Stop Fellow, please email [email protected].
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