Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the university’s Creative Writing Program to create a two-year graduate assistantship for one incoming MFA poet. The assistantship will start in the fall of 2014. The selected candidate will receive a $12,500 stipend for each year in the program and will work with Letras Latinas, the Institute for Latino Studies’ (ILS) literary initiative. The creation of this assistantship is uniform with the ILS’s aim to provide financial opportunities to graduate students in Latino Studies. ILS Director José Limón says of the new stipend, “Together with our intense faculty recruitment, this ILS graduate funding opportunity in creative writing, under the direction of our esteemed colleague, Orlando Menes, is the first major step toward and model for the creation of an ILS-focused program of graduate study within the cognate departments of the College of Arts and Letters. In the future, we want any student contemplating graduate work in Latino Studies to put Notre Dame at the very top of his or her list of programs.”

Now named the Letras Latinas Writers Initiative, the assistantship will require the recipient to further develop this project as coordinator. This task coincides with the more focal objective of the stipend to provide the recipient with opportunities to progress as a writer. Of working with the next candidate, Menes said, “I look forward to mentoring the next generation of Latino poets who see culture as fertile soil for their poetics.”

Source: Letras Latinas Blog