Corey Van Landingham, professor of English in the Creative Writing Program, has been awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. Van Landingham is one of two U of I fellowship recipients, along with history professor Kristin Hoganson.
The two are among 198 individuals working across 53 disciplines chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 3,500 applicants. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships are awarded to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.
Van Landingham’s project centers on the development of a poetry collection focusing on moments of exile, quarantine, and other forms of isolation and solitude. These poems range from Venice’s quarantine measures during the Black Death to contemporary forest fire lookouts, from empty Zoom office hours to the 1,000-mile solo migration of OR-7, the first wild wolf seen in western Oregon since 1947. Across this work, she also plans to explore how meaningful engagement with seclusion and silence can reinforce individual thought and sustained meditation, particularly in an era saturated in literal and figurative noise: 24-hour news cycles, live-tweeting, the ship traffic interfering with whales’ echolocation.
On a research trip to Italy funded by an Illinois Campus Research Support Award, Van Landingham visited the ruins of the Villa Giulia on the tiny island where Julia the Elder — Augustus Caesar’s daughter — was exiled for five years. Part of Van Landingham’s project is to develop a series of poems spoken from her perspective and to write into the subjugation of other Roman women under the stultifying and isolating reign of pater familias.
Van Landingham is the author of “Antidote,” winner of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry; “Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens,” winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize; and most recently, “Reader, I” (2024). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review and The New Yorker. A recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Illinois.
Editor's note: A version of this story was originally published by the Illinois News Bureau.