Black Mountain offers nine-month fellowships to published writers and public intellectuals. Support for individual fellows is generously provided by Sonja and Michael Saltman, the International Women's Forum, and the Library of Congress. Fellowships are awarded to candidates whose work ranges away from the American experience and into international terrain, and who have an ongoing project that would benefit from a period of sustained immersion. The program accepts applications from novelists, poets, playwrights, historians, political scientists, independent scholars, and anyone else whose work is meant for a general, educated lay audience.

Black Mountain awards three to five fellowships each year to outstanding writers who have published at least one critically acclaimed book before the time of application. Foreign nationals conversant in English are welcome to apply. There are no degree requirements.

Fellows receive a $50,000 stipend, an office, a computer, and access to UNLV's Lied Library. They remain in residence at BMI for the duration of the fellowship term (approximately August 24, 2009 to May 14, 2010) and work daily at the BMI offices. Fellows are required to give a talk on their work-in-progress to other fellows, as well as to a wide range of invited guests, and to take part in BMI programs. Additionally, fellows must make themselves available, on occasion, as visitors to UNLV graduate classes in fields related to their own work.

For the 2008-09 through 2010-11 residency cycles, BMI is pleased to offer one fellowship in conjunction with the Library of Congress. The successful candidate will spend a portion of his or her time in Las Vegas and a portion at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., making use of the nation's largest and most prestigious research library. Applicants may make their preference for this particular fellowship known on the general application form. More information about the John W. Kluge Center is available from the Library of Congress.

Application deadline: February 1, 2009
Notification of selection results: May 1, 2009

The PDF application for the 2009-10 fellowship cycle can be downloaded here.

Luljeta Lleshanaku, International Women's Forum Fellow
Luljeta Lleshanaku, one of Albania's foremost younger poets, is the author of four critically acclaimed collections: The Sleepwalker's Eyes, Sunday Bells, Half-Cubism, and Antipastoral. Selections from those books were gathered by editor Henry Israeli and translated into English for Fresco, published in 2002 by New Directions. Her newest project is a collection of literary essays about the historical, cultural, and anthropological roots of her poems. Luljeta grew up under virtual house arrest for her family's opposition to Enver Hoxha's dictatorship and she was prohibited from attending college or publishing her work until after the regime's collapse in 1991. She received a literature degree from the University of Tirana and later held editorial posts at the weekly magazine Zëri i rinisë (The Voice of Youth) and the literary newspaper Drita (The Light). In 1999, she participated in the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Mary Palevsky BMI - Kluge Fellow in partnership with the Library of Congress
Mary Palevsky directed the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project at UNLV from 2003 to 2008. She is the author of Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions, which explores the moral legacy of the atomic bomb through the experience of her parents, both scientists at Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, and through interviews with leading Manhattan Project scientist. She is currently working on a book examining the role of underground nuclear testing in America's democratic development. Mary's work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner magazines. From 1975 to 2002, she wrote and produced ESL and Spanish language programs for business, industry, and nonprofit institutions through the Granados School of Languages, an organization she founded with her husband. She holds a doctorate from the Fielding Graduate Institute.

Robert Rosenberg, Sonja and Michael Saltman Fellow
Robert Rosenberg is the author of the novel This Is Not Civilization, a Borders Original Voices pick and the recipient of the 2005 Maria Thomas Fiction Award. He is currently at work on a novel set in Istanbul that explores the overlapping heritage of Jews and Armenians in the city, and he frequently contributes book reviews to The Miami Herald and The Moscow Times. Robert served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan from 1994-1996 and later taught high school on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona. A graduate of Columbia University, he received an MFA from the Iowa Writer' Workshop, where he was awarded a Maytag Fellowship and a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Bucknell University.

The Diana L. Bennett Fellows Program is generously funded by Sonja and Michael Saltman, the International Women's Forum, and the Library of Congress.