Application Requirements
By December 1, send to:
Bennett Fellowship
Phillips Exeter Academy
Box # 2339
20 Main Street
Exeter, New Hampshire 03833-2460
- The application, including the names, addresses and telephone
number of two people clearly competent to discuss you as a writer and
as a person and to judge your qualifications for the Fellowship. Do not
have your college or graduate school placement office send the
conventional dossier. We will not contact those you name as references
unless your manuscript reaches the final stage of competition.
- A statement of your own testifying to the appropriateness of the
Fellowship to your situation. Be specific about the manuscript that
possession of the Fellowship would allow you to complete, noting
current progress and so forth.
NOTE: The
committee favors applicants who have not yet published a book-length
work with a ‘major’ publisher - i.e., a well-financed publisher with
national distribution. If your work has enjoyed such publication, your
statement should explain why you consider yourself unestablished, as a
writer or in the genre represented by your manuscript.
- Your manuscript: if prose, about 50 typed pages of recent
composition (send representative selections from longer works); if
poetry, 20 to 30 pages. (Manuscripts not postmarked December 1 or
before will be returned.)
- Five dollars, cash or check payable to Phillips Exeter Academy. If
you wish your manuscript returned, also include a self-addressed
envelope stamped with adequate postage.
When you have submitted all of the above, you will be informed that
your application is complete. A choice will be made, and all entrants
notified around March 15.
The manuscripts are the primary basis for the selection of the
Fellow, and each manuscript will receive the careful attention of the
selection committee, made up of the members of the Academy English
Department. We are genuine in our desire to select the most promising
candidate, and we are always conscious that the Fellowship is for a
writer at the beginning of his or her career and that much of the
material we receive is necessarily unfinished.
Visit http://www.exeter.edu/about_us/about_us_537.aspx#APPLICATION_REQUIREMENTS
for more details as well as an engaging essay by Laura Moriarty on her acceptance and subsequent experience.