Corey Van Landingham BA ’08 has joined the 2025 class of Guggenheim Fellows—one of just 198 creatives and scholars selected from a nationwide pool of nearly 3,500 applicants for the award’s centennial year. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has provided fellowships “to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions,” according to the foundation’s website.
The fellowship will underwrite a yearlong poetry project that explores how isolation—whether in a medieval plague’s quarantine or a 21st Zoom call—can sharpen both perception and imagination. “The Guggenheim will allow me to take some time off from teaching and allow me to do some more travel research to complete this new manuscript,” she says. “Time might be the greatest gift for writers, and I do not take this privilege lightly.”
Van Landingham received the news while another alum—Zach Simon BA ’17, a former MFA student of hers, and now a colleague—was helping her and her husband move.
“They had this big sleeper sofa literally stuck in the door frame when I came down the stairs in a state of shock, saying, ‘I think I maybe got a Guggenheim?’ It felt even more special to be able to share that moment with him.”
Van Landingham honed her craft on Palatine Hill. While at Lewis & Clark, she studied English, volunteered in the William Stafford Archives, coedited Synergia: Journal of Gender Thought and Expression, and ventured to Cuenca, Ecuador, on an overseas study program.
She says that none of her “big kid poet life” would have been possible without Mary Szybist, Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities, and Jerry Harp, associate professor with term of humanities.
“I came to Lewis & Clark as an international affairs major, but after my first two creative writing classes with them, I switched my major to English and took every poetry class I could,” says Van Landingham. “Mary’s advanced poetry workshop my senior year helped me imagine the long life of a poet—in her teaching, her expectations of us, the readings she assigned, and the poets she brought to campus. She has supported me in that goal ever since. Karen Gross [professor of English] and Ben David [associate professor of art history] also instilled in me a great love of art, which informs many of the poems at the heart of my new project.”
Since graduating, Van Landingham has built a national reputation for lyric precision and social insight. She is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry; Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize; and most recently, Reader, I (Sarabande Books, 2024). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review and The New Yorker. A recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I remember being struck not just by the tenderness of the elegies Corey wrote as an undergraduate, but by the fierceness of her drive to say what was true, no matter how difficult those truths might be,” says Professor Szybist. “Corey is an incredible poet. We are all so proud of her.”
English Creative Writing
