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 application period for the 2009-10 residency cycle is closed.

Timothy O'Grady, Tom and Mary Gallagher Fellow
Timothy O'Grady is the author of several recent books of nonfiction, including Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland's Unfinished Revolution, with Kenneth Griffith; On Golf; and Divine Magnetic Lands: A Journey in America. He is has also published three novels, including Motherland, a recipient of the David Hingham Award in 1989, and I Could Read the Sky, a novel with photographs by Steve Pike and winner of Britain's Encore Award for best second novel of 1998. He is currently at work on a novel about a retired IRA sniper, never caught or tried for his crimes, now working as a painter and living under an assumed name in a transient hotel in Los Angeles. He is concurrently working on a book of nonfiction about the barely visible subculture of those living off the societal map - in transient hotels, trailer camps, and the wilderness - in the modern American West. O'Grady has lived in England, Ireland, Spain, and, most recently, Poland, and has written for British newspapers The Times, The Sunday Times, the Guardian, and The Observer, as well as for American magazines Esquire, Golf World, and Conde Nast Traveller, among others. Born in Chicago, he is a citizen of both Ireland and the United States and is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Judith Nies, BMI - Kluge Fellow in partnership with the Library of Congress
Judith Nies is the author of three books of history, including The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative of the Sixties and Native American History: A Chronology, and the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Grant in Bellagio, Italy, and residential fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Mesa Refuge. Her article, "The Black Mesa Syndrome: Indian Lands, Black Gold" was a recent finalist for the John Oakes Award in Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and is included in the anthology, The Future of Nature, edited by Barry Lopez. Her current research examines the political, governmental, and environmental arrangements kept in place for decades on Black Mesa, Arizona, the single largest coal strip mining, electrification, and water-harvesting project in the United States. The book she is currently writing chronicles, at a human level, the resulting environmental and cultural damage incurred on the Hopi and Navajo reservations, most of which has remained invisible in mainstream media. Also an essayist and reporter, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Orion, and Harvard Review. She is a graduate of Tufts University and holds master's degrees from both Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities.

Lavonne Mueller, International Women's Forum Fellow
Lavonne Mueller's plays have been produced to critical acclaim in numerous venues in the United States as well as in such countries as Brazil, Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic, India, Scotland, and England. She is the recipient of honors and awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller grant, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, Fulbrights to Argentina and Jordan, an Asian Culture Council grant to Calcutta, a Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission grant, and the Roger Stevens Playwriting Award. She is a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellow, and has been a speaker for the United States Information Agency in India, Finland, Romania, Japan, the former Yugoslavia, and Norway. As a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, she has helped colleges establish writing programs around the country. Currently she is completing the third play in a trilogy entitled Women In War: Silent Screams. The final play explores the experiences of twenty-five severely disfigured Japanese women brought to America in 1955 for reconstructive surgery following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is based on historical events. She holds a B.A. from Indiana State and a graduate degree from Northern Illinois 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.