Peter Turchi '82, author of four books and director of one of the most highly respected writing programs in the country, has been awarded a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for work on a second collection of short stories and a second collection of essays about writing.
Turchi has been Director of the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1993. In addition to teaching writers, Turchi began to write about the process of writing. His book Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, was published in October 2004, and went into a second printing in March.
His Guggenheim project includes a series of essays on writing as a way of seeing. Several of these essays grew out of conversations with the artist Charles Ritchie for the "Suburban Journals" exhibition catalogue, which Turchi edited. The touring exhibition is at the University of Georgia in Athens through the summer of 2005.
Turchi began his writing career with his novel The Girls Next Door, which began to take shape while he was in college. He won the Sophie Kerr Prize in 1982 for his demonstrated promise as a writer.
Since then, he has published a collection of stories, Magician, and two books of nonfiction. He co-edited, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, and with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Contemporary Stories and How They Work.
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