Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing alumna Olena Kalytiak Davis received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship award in recognition of her poetic life and works. Davis joins a growing list of UI&U/Vermont College alumni, faculty, and staff to receive Guggenheim Fellowships, including M.F.A. in Writing faculty Richard Jackson, Ph.D., William Olsen, Ph.D., and Mary Ruefle, M.A.

Davis received word of her fellowship in 2004. She is one of 185 artists, scholars, and scientists chosen from over 3,000 applicants. Fellows are selected by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, based upon “distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishments.”

Poet Rita Dove selected Davis’ first book, And Her Soul Out of Nothing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), for the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, saying of Davis’ work, “There is an eerie precision…that renders each moment in both it absolute clarity and ultimate transitory fragility.”

Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities (Tin House/Bloomsbury, 2003), Davis’ second book, became a Book Sense Poetry Top Ten Pick. Herman Fong, the bookshop owner who nominated Shattered Sonnets for the Book Sense Poetry Top Ten Pick, notes that “to enter Davis’ poetic world is to throw yourself into an exquisite storm."

In her ten years of writing, Davis says she has learned that writing is about the “intimacy and immediacy” of connecting to some living thing. She remarks, “I am attracted to words the way some people are to shoes, or to, say, other people. They don’t have to be fancy or extraordinary…"

In addition to the Guggenheim, Davis has received a Ron Jaffe Foundation award and a Pushcart Prize, and her individual poems have been included in four BestAmerican Poetry anthologies.

Davis continues to write in Alaska, but has lived in Detroit, San Francisco, Prague, Lviv, Paris, and Chicago. She studied at Wayne State University and University of Michigan Law School before attending Vermont College, graduating in 1995 with an M.F.A. in Writing. She is currently working on a new poetry manuscript titled On the Kitchen Table from which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed.