MFA alum Edgar Kunz named Guggenheim Fellow
MFA alum Edgar Kunz (’15) was named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. Edgar Kunz is the author of two books: Fixer (Ecco, 2023), a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019), which the Washington Post called “a gritty, insightful debut.” Kunz has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Hawthornden Foundation, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His work appears in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Poetry, Oxford American, Yale Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. He splits his time between Baltimore and Richmond, where he teaches in the English Department and MFA program at VCU. His next book is about growing up in a medieval anachronist society.
The Guggenheim Foundation offers Fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form under the freest possible conditions. From the beginning, we have awarded our Fellowships based on merit alone, promising in our founding charter to “[aid] without distinction on account of race, color or creed, scholars, scientists and artists of either sex in the prosecution of their labors.” Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.