Matthew Vollmer awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

Matthew Vollmer, an advanced instructor of creative writing and a graduate advisor in the Department of English at Virginia Tech, has been awarded a $25,000 Literature Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The fellowship encourages the production of new work by affording the recipients the time and means to write. Vollmer says he will use the time to continue to work on a novel about the shamanic journeys of a young mother whose boyfriend returns to their small mountain community, following a tour of duty in the Middle East.

Vollmer is author of Future Missionaries of America, a highly praised collection of short stories published in the United States in 2009 by MacAdam Cage and in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia by Salt Publishing in 2010.

Vollmer's work has also appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Tin House, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Antioch Review, Portland Review, Confrontation, Salt Hill, Fugue, PRISM International, and New Letters. His work has been twice short-listed for the Best American Short Stories series, and he has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize.

Vollmer, a resident of Blacksburg, Va., holds a Bachelor in Arts degree in English from the University of North Carolina, a Master in Arts in English from North Carolina State University, and a Master in Fine Arts in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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