Heartland Journalism Residency Fellowship & Fellowship Application

This fellowship is supported by the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity; the Department of African and African American Studies; The Common Reader (the online Journal of the Essay of Washington University); the English Department; Urban Studies; the Center for the Humanities; the Black Heartland Fund of Washington University; and the River City Journalism Fund.

This fellowship is designed to support the development of minority, underrepresented, and marginalized journalists from St. Louis or the larger Missouri region in honing their craft as investigators, researchers, and long-form writers. Fellows are required to complete a project that would produce one or more pieces of long-form journalism and several related blog posts. The pieces would initially appear in The Common Reader but would also be available for use by the other fellowship sponsors. Also, sponsors may have the fellows make a presentation about their work in a forum that serves the sponsor’s constituency or an audience of the general public. During their fellowship term, fellows would have access to the WU library and be paired with one or more Washington University faculty members who have relevant expertise related to their project. The fellows would be supervised by Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letter in the Departments of English and African and African American Studies, supported by Ben Fulton, Managing Editor of The Common Reader. The fellowship amount is $10,000 for the full academic year, or $5,500 for one semester application, or $4,000 for a summer only application. The fellow is expected to produce 12,000 words for the full year fellowship, 10,000 words for one semester, or 6,000 words for the summer.

It is strongly preferred if the fellow is from St. Louis or the state of Missouri. The fellow must be a member of an underrepresented, minority, or marginalized group and willing to write journalism about some aspect, circumstance, or situation of that group or particular individuals of that group locally or in the immediate region for the term of the fellowship. The fellow must be in residence in St. Louis for the term of the fellowship. All finalists will be interviewed by a special selection committee that may include representatives from CRE2, The Common Reader, the Department of African and African American Studies, the Center for the Humanities, Urban Studies, the English Department, the River City Journalism Fund, or any other partners who support the fellowship would make up the selection committee.