UE Professor Wins Guggenheim Award

William Baer, professor of English at UE and the Melvin M. Peterson endowed chair in English literature, has received word that he is receiving a prestigious 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship Award. Baer, who has been an English faculty member at UE since 1989, was honored this January as the Melvin M. Peterson endowed chair in English literature.

He teaches creative writing, cinema and world cultures at UE. Baer will receive $40,000 to work in spring 2008 to translate the sonnets of the Portuguese poet Manuel Bocage (1765-1805). "I'm delighted with my good fortune," Baer said, "and very grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation."

The 83rd annual Guggenheim Awards' winners include 189 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants. The fellowships are awarded "to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts."

Baer is no newcomer to winning awards for his works. He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for fiction, and the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award. He has also received an Association for Theatre in Higher Education Development Award and the James K. Wilson Playwriting Award. He was the founding editor and publisher of The Formalist, a journal of metrical poetry published from 1990-2004. He is the author of 12 books, including "Borges" and Other Sonnets, Writing Metrical Poetry, Luis de Camoes: Selected Sonnets, Conversations with Derek Walcott, and Elia Kazan: Interviews. His award-winning play The Amistad Case, was produced at the Dayton Playhouse, and his bio-drama, Guiteau, was performed at the Metropolitan Theater of New York.

Baer holds a BA degree from Rutgers University, an MA in English from New York University,
an MA in writing from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and a doctorate in English from the University of South Carolina.