Jacob Strautmann (Poetry ’00) has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) Artistic Fellowship! The MCC committee reviewed poems from his forthcoming book The Land of the Dead is Open for Business (Four Way Books, Spring 2020!). Visit Jake’s MCC Artist Fellowship Page here. To read more about the fellowship, click here.
Finalists of the MCC Fellowships include alumni Kirun Kapur (also Poetry ’00) and Jill McDonough (Poetry ’98). The fellowship recognizes “exceptional work by Massachusetts artists across a range of disciplines.”
Since graduating from the program, Jake has taught undergraduate creative writing at BU. He had this to say about teaching:
While my day-job is handling the finances for Boston Playwrights’ Theatre as their Managing Director, I’ve always found great fulfillment teaching creative writing at Boston University. Starting in 2002, in my thirty-odd classes of Intro to Creative Writing (EN 202) and Writing of Plays (EN 306), I’ve been lucky enough to find students who keep challenging me, who keep me from settling on one kind of lesson I could repeat each semester. Their insistence that I not be lazy is mirrored in what I’ve been sure to tell them: no one knows if he or she will be a writer for years and years. The fellowship and the book won’t make me a better teacher, but I hope they offer my students some proof of the persistence gospel all writing teachers preach.
Congratulations, Jake!
Jacob Strautmann is the Managing Director of the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. In addition, he is currently a contributing editor for Salamander Magazine. His poems have appeared in Forklift, Ohio, Unsplendid, The Harlequin, Salamander Magazine, The Boston Globe, Agni Online, The Appalachian Journal, Solstice, Jam Tarts, Quiddity (where he won the Editor’s Prize in Poetry), and Appalachian Heritage. His poems are forthcoming in The Southern Humanities Review.
