Louise Bokkenheuser Selected as Bennington Writing Seminars Residential Teaching Fellow
Louise Bokkenheuser, an MFA student in fiction, has been selected to be the eighth Residential Teaching Fellow at the Bennington Writing Seminars.
The fellowship is the first of its kind in the country to offer full-time undergraduate teaching experience in a low-residency MFA format. Benefits include full tuition remission for one term, housing and board, and enrollment in an on-campus class. Bokkenheuser will begin in February.
“Now in its eighth term, this competitive fellowship has been a great success for our MFA students, the undergraduates they mentor, and for each teacher,” said Mark Wunderlich, Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. "Each term it gets more difficult to choose a fellow from our talented MFA candidates and we’re delighted to welcome Louise into the classroom this term.”
Bokkenheuser will be working with Bennington literature faculty member Paul La Farge in his Spring 2022 class, Speculative Fiction. Her duties include grading, advising, assisting in the development of course materials, guest lecturing, and research, among other responsibilities, along with continuing her regular MFA coursework.
“I’m thrilled by the opportunity to work with Paul La Farge, a writer I admire greatly, and to get to know the Bennington students as they explore the worlds of speculative fiction,” said Bokkenheuser.
Louise Bokkenheuser came to fiction after a 20-year detour through the peaks and valleys of American journalism that included time as a crime reporter in L.A., a gossip columnist in Hollywood, a war correspondent in Iraq and a political reporter in Iowa and beyond. She spent almost a decade at the Los Angeles Times, before becoming the Foreign Editor at successively The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Mashable and HuffPost. Her first book, a memoir, was published in 2009. She grew up in Denmark.
The competitive teaching fellowship is open to Bennington MFA students rising into their second, third or fourth term. Students are mentored one-on-one with the faculty member with whom they are working, and continue to work on their MFA coursework and manuscript.
Application deadlines to the Bennington Writing Seminars are September 1 (for admission to the January residency) and March 1 (for admission to the June residency.)