Hall teaches two poetry workshops and a literature class each year at the College. This semester, he is teaching English Form and Freedom, which is a course on English prosody, as well as several special topics. Hall is finishing up his second year of a three-year appointment at the College. He will leave after teaching two poetry workshops next fall.
"He's a brilliant poet and a brilliant teacher," said Andrew Unger '03, who has taken Writing Poetry I and two special topics with Hall. "He has introduced me to a lot of great literature and helped me to appreciate it."
"[Hall] has a genuine interest and respect for his students' intellectual pursuit,"Unger added.
Hall's reaction to receiving the fellowship ran "the gamut, from pleased to ridiculously happy."
Hall has published two books of poetry and said that the Guggenheim Fellowship will "buy a large block of time in which to write-specifically, I hope to finish my third book of poems."
Prior to his position at the College, Hall taught at Connecticut College for one semester.
A fiction writer, Messud teaches two courses in writing fiction at the College, as well as English 94: Readings in Tragi-Comedy of the 20th Century.
"As a writing teacher, I respect what she has to offer me," said Becca Corvino '03, who took Fiction I last year and is currently doing a special topics with Messud. "I have learned a lot from her. She has gotten me to write in ways that I have never written before."
Messud has published two novels in addition to a book of two novellas. She will be leaving the College after this semester, and she plans on working on her next novel, which is set in contemporary New York City.
"I am thrilled," Messud said of receiving the fellowship. "It's wonderful. It will enable me to work on my writing in the months ahead."
The third recipient of the Fellowship at the College is Subrin. Her main areas of interest are the "history, theory and practice of independent cinema and video."
She received $49,000 from the Guggenheim Foundation to support the research and writing of her current feature-length screenplay, "1989." The fellowship will allow her to devote almost all of her time to the project. Next fall, she will serve as a visiting lecturer in visual and environmental studies at Harvard University, but will only teach one class.
Subrin has written and directed several award-winning films. Her distribution company, Video Data Bank, describes her recent work on their website as "engaging conventions of documentary and personal narrative ... the works strategically undermine their own forms, shifting historical periods, genres and identifications to explore the residual impact of feminism and the hazy boundaries between fiction and nonfiction."
Subrin has been at the College for five years. During her time here, she has taught classes on documentary form, biography, experimental and avant-garde film, technology and gender, narrative cinema and the history of video art.
The fellowship is given by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and its purpose is to "help provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible." Fellows may spend their grants any way they consider necessary to further their work. In 2001, each Guggenheim Fellow received an average of $35,931 from the Foundation.
In 2002, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded 184 fellowships, from a pool of over 2,800 applicants, for awards totalling $6,750,000. Decisions were based on recommendations from expert advisors and were approved by the Foundation's board of trustees.
Past fellows include Ansel Adams, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Nabokov.