CSU Announces New Carson McCullers Center Writing Fellow

Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is proud to announce that fiction writer Christine Vines is the winner of the 15th annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. As the fellowship recipient, Vines will live and work in Carson McCullers’s childhood home, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus, Georgia, in the fall.

Christine Vines is a fiction writer from Wichita, Kansas. Her work has appeared in Witness, Joyland, The Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

Vines was a runner-up for the 2018 Nelson Algren Award by The Chicago Tribune and a fiction finalist for the 2018 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize by The Missouri Review. She was a 2018-2019 Steinbeck Fellow and a 2018 W.K. Rose Fellow for Vassar College.

Vines received her MFA from Cornell University, and has taught English and creative writing at Cornell and San Jose State University. For four years, she ran the Fiction Addiction reading series in NYC.

Named in honor of Carson’s parents, The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers was inspired by McCullers’s experience at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont and, especially, the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. To honor the contribution of these residency fellowships to McCullers’s work, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians awards fellowships for writers to spend time in McCullers’s childhood home in Columbus, Georgia.

The fellowships are intended to afford the writers in residence uninterrupted time to dedicate to their work, free from the distractions of daily life and other professional responsibilities.