2010 Dobie Paisano Fellows Announced

Austin represented well with the just announced winners of the 2010 Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowships: Once and very-near-future Austinite Philipp Meyer, a Michener alum, and John Pipkin, who has taught at Southwestern University and at UT, will split time at the 250-acre ranch/writers' retreat.

Both men received acclaim for recent publications: Pipkin for Woodsburner – a fictionalized account of when Thoreau set a forest fire prior to his Walden Pond days, which won the Fiction Award from the Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Texas Institute of Letters' 2010 Steven Turner Award – and Meyer for American Rust, a bestseller about an industry town in decline and what Meyer calls the "ugly reverse of the American Dream." Meyer was a runner-up for the 2009 Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a setback we suspect was made slightly less stinging by his Guggenheim Fellowship, a film option, and a raft of "Best Book of the Year" notices. Both Pipkin and Meyer plan to use their time at the Dobie Paisano to continue their work on new novels.

For more information about the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, go here.