Tom Bissell, an assistant professor of English and liberal arts at Portland State, has been awarded a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in creative arts for general nonfiction, which he plans to use to finish his current book.
Bissell said he has published five books and multiple articles and is currently working on his sixth book. In addition, he is a contributing editor to two publications and a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Review.
There were approximately 3,000 candidates for the 86th annual Guggenheim competition, but only 180 fellowships were awarded. After applications are submitted, a meticulous selection process follows. First, applications are divided into groups within their fields, examined by hundreds of advisors, who are fellows, and finally submitted with a critique and rank to the board of trustees, which then makes the final decision, according to its website.
Although Bissell said he felt he had as good of a chance of receiving the fellowship as anyone else, he was nevertheless stunned to get the Guggenheim.
“I know so many people for whom the prize has been a creative life-saver and never imagined I would be among them,” he said.
Bissell was encouraged to write by friends of his father, Philip Caputo and Jim Harrison, according to a profile published in Poets & Writers 40. Caputo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, and Harisson is a poet and fiction writer whose works include Legends of the Fall, the novella that inspired the 1994 film starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn.
Bissell plans to use the Guggenheim Fellowship prize to take time off and finish a nonfiction travel book about early Christianity that he has been working on for five years, he said. His proposed title for the book is The Tombs of the Twelve Apostles.
Bissell said he has already spent five years researching for the book, and has traveled to 10 countries in Europe and the Middle East, including Israel, Italy, Turkey, Germany and France. He still plans to travel to India to conduct research about St. Thomas and to Kyrgyzstan to research St. Matthew.
Commenting on his financial difficulties, Bissell said, “It has not been cheap.”
Bissell also won the 2006 Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which partially subsidizes two young writers of promise for a year’s residence at the American Academy in Rome, according to its website.
Currently, Bissell is in Los Angeles, Calif. working on an audio version of his book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.
Bissell has lived in Michigan, Uzbekistan, New York, Saigon, Rome, Las Vegas and Estonia, according to the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s website. As of now, he lives in Portland, Ore.
Works by Tom Bissell
Published books:
–Chasing the Sea: Lost among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (2003)
–Speak, Commentary (2003) with Jeff Alexander
–God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories (2005)
–The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007)
–Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010)
Contributing editor to:
–Harpers
–Virginia Quarterly Review