EUGENE–Ehud Havazelet and Dorianne Laux, associate professors in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program, and Monte Westerfield, a UO professor of biology, are among this year’s recipients of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, one of the most distinguished prizes in the nation.

Results of the Guggenheim Foundation’s 77th annual competition were announced Wednesday (April 11) by foundation president Joel Conarroe. The 2001 winners include 183 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 2,700 applicants. Together, the winners will receive awards totaling $6,588,000.

With three recipients this year, the University of Oregon has the most Guggenheim fellows from a single institution in the Pacific Northwest. One Evergreen State College faculty member was picked, while the University of Washington had two selected.

Altogether, 37 current University of Oregon faculty have been Guggenheim fellows, including Garrett Hongo, a creative writing professor selected in 1990. Westerfield is the 10th UO biology professor so honored.

Richard Linton, vice provost for research and Graduate School dean, adds the UO research community "is delighted that Westerfield has been honored as a recipient of this prestigious award.

"This is well-deserved recognition for his many years of pioneering work in elucidating the mechanisms that influence neurodevelopment," Linton says. "Monte’s investigations involving the use of zebrafish, in combination with physiological and genetic probes, have been crucial to the University of Oregon’s emergence as a valuable resource for the world’s biomedical researchers."

Havazelet, director of the UO Creative Writing Program, is the author of two collections of stories, "Like Never Before" and "What Is It Then Between Us?" He is currently at work on a novel, under contract with publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Last year, Havazelet was awarded a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. In 1999, he won the prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Oregon Book Award for "Like Never Before."

The Corvallis resident has published stories in journals such as DoubleTake, The New England Review, the Southern Review and Crazyhorse. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Havazelet was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and on the faculty at Oregon State University before joining the University of Oregon in 1999.

Laux, who has been with the Creative Writing Program six years, is the author of three books of poetry, "What We Carry," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; "Awake"; and the recently published "Smoke." She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of "The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry."

Laux is the recipient of a 2001 National Endowment for the Arts grant, her second NEA award. Last month, Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz invited her to give a reading at the Library of Congress.

She has published poems in dozens of prestigious journals, including The New England Review, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review and The Kenyon Review. One of her poems was selected for Best American Poetry in 1999.

Westerfield, who joined the UO faculty in 1981 after two years as a researcher at the Harvard Medical School’s neurobiology department, conducts research on mechanisms that regulate patterning of the anterior central nervous system. A 1973 graduate of Princeton University in biology and physics, he earned his doctorate in physiology and pharmacology from Duke University in 1977.

Currently director of the university’s Zebrafish International Resource Center, Westerfield is a former director of the UO Institute of Neuroscience. His previous awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Muscular Dystrophy Postdoctoral Fellowship, a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Training Grant, a Max Planck Society Senior Research Grant and a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship.

According to the foundation, Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

The new fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, choreographers, photographers, film makers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars. Eighty-nine higher education institutions are represented by one or more fellows who range in age from 26 to 80.

Scores of Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and eminent scientists appear on the roll of fellows, which includes Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguschi, Linus Pauling, Paul Samuelson, Martha Graham, Philip Roth, Derek Walcott, James Watson and Eudora Welty.

For more information, contact the UO Creative Writing Program, (541) 346-0544, or the Department of Biology, 346-4502.

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