Oakland, CA - Daniel Alarcón, distinguished visiting professor at Mills College, has received a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. Results of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 83rd annual United States and Canadian competition were just announced by Foundation president Edward Hirsch. The 2007 Fellowship winners include 189 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7,600,000. 

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished past achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, and elsewhere. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. Alarcón’s story collection, War by Candlelight*, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the British journal Granta recently named him one of the Best Young American Novelists. A former Fulbright Scholar to Peru and the recipient of a Whiting Award for 2004, he published his first novel, Lost City Radio, in February 2007.

*The San Francisco Chronicle named War by Candlelight (HarperCollins) in their “Best Books of 2005” selections. War by Candlelight features stories of Peru’s gritty street life. “Civil strife and natural disasters mark these nine unflinching stories set in upper Manhattan and the blighted countryside and atrophied capital of Peru,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Guggenheim Fellows are selected based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors, and are approved by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, which currently includes six members who are past Fellows: Joel Conarroe, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard A. Rifkind, Charles Ryskamp, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Edward Hirsch.

Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering innovative degree programs for undergraduate women, and graduate degree and certificate programs for women and men. Consistently recognized as one of the top 100 liberal arts colleges in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, Mills currently ranks among the top 20 most diverse liberal arts colleges. The New York Times recently selected Mills as one of three leading California colleges for students to consider.

In 2006, the Washington Monthly College Rankings named Mills a leading liberal arts college based on community service, research spending, quality of preparation for graduate education, and social mobility. In addition, The Princeton Review’s annual guide, the Best 361 Colleges (2007) included Mills for the second year in a row among top U.S. institutions offering students an outstanding undergraduate education.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California on 135 lush acres, Mills provides a dynamic liberal arts education fostering women’s leadership, social responsibility, and creativity.

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