Preeti Kaur Rajpal was awarded the 2022 McKnight Artist Fellowships in Creative Writing. Djerassi alum ('22),Preeti Kaur Rajpal, was awarded the 2022 McKnight Artist Fellowships in Creative Writing. Preeti's work can be found in The Sikh Review, Spook, Tupelo Quarterly, The Lantern Review, and other publications. Her debut poetry book, membery, explores issues of belonging, to both family and the nation-state, and will be published by Tupelo Press. Read more.

Ken Eklund accepts a Peabody Legacy Award. Ken Eklund, Djerassi alum ('17), received a Peabody Legacy Award for an alternate reality game, World Without Oil, created in 2007. The Peabody organization recognized it as a groundbreaking achievement in the category of Digital and Interactive work. Read more.

Preeti Vangani was awarded the 2022 Pen/Dau Prize. Djerassi alum ('22), Preeti Vangani, was awarded the 2022 Pen/Dau Prize for her debut short story, Work Wives, and will be included in the Best American Short Stories Anthology produced by Catapult. The full story can be read in Typehouse Literary Magazine on page 116. Read Work Wives on page 116.

Monique Truong wins the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Monique Truong, a 2018 alum, has been named the winner of the 2021 Press Award for her work as a novelist and essayist who explores themes of food, displacement and hunger. Monique was selected from a pool of more than 400 entires from 45 states and is known for her best-selling novels The Book of Salt (2003), Bitter in the Mouth (2010) and The Sweetest Fruits (2019). Read more

Krista DeNio Named 2021 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow. The California Arts Council (CAC) has announced the recipients of its 2021 inaugural Individual Artists Fellowship, naming Krista DeNio, a 2021 Djerassi alum, as a fellow among its 182 grantees in support of their creative practice. Krista DeNio is a choreographer, director, performer, writer and educator, committed to developing new forms of performance work, and evolving interdisciplinary thinking and creation between the fields of dance and theater. Read more

Women Directors Choreographers and Composers Award The postponed presentation of the 2020 Women Directors Choreographers and Composers Award to Wendy Whalen (Associate Artistic Director of the NYCB), took place on October 4th, 2021 in New York City. Two outstanding women choreographers, Sidra Bell and Andrea Miller, whose work has been commissioned by Wendy Whelan for this season's New York City Ballet program, also participated in the award presentation. Sidra Bell was a guest at Artful Harvest this year and has expressed great interest in a future choreography residency at the Djerassi Program. Read more