The William F. Laman Public Library System announced this week that Hope Coulter is the recipient of its 2014 Laman Library Writers Fellowship. The fellowship, which has been given yearly since 2010, awards $10,000 to a previously published Arkansas author.
Coulter is a fiction writer and poet who has taught creative writing at Hendrix College since 1993. She has previously been a finalist for the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first two novels — “The Errand of the Eye” and “Dry Bones” — were published in 1988 and 1990, respectively, by August House Publishers, and her children’s picture book, “Uncle Chuck’s Truck,” came out in 1993 from Bradbury Press.
On Friday, January 10, the Laman Library will host a ceremony to honor Coulter and present her check. The ceremony will take place during a reception, held from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., for the library’s new exhibit, “George Fisher; The Presidents.” Fisher was a popular Arkansas political cartoonist for the Gazette and the Times and the exhibit highlights his often-biting portrayals of the Nixon, Carter, Ford, Reagan and Bush administrations.
Coulter was selected for the Laman Fellowship by a panel of literary professionals. The fellowship can go to writers working in any genre. Previous fellows are Grif Stockley, author of six legal novels and several non-fiction books on race relations in Arkansas; Kevin Brockmeier, adult novelist and children’s author, and Mara Leveritt, true crime journalist and author and Davis McComb, whose work appears in “The Best American Poetry” 1996 and 2008.