Fellowships & Scholarships
Financial Aid
Students seeking federal financial aid and other non-SMC funding are encouraged to visit the Federal Student Aid and FinAid websites. Saint Mary's College of California's Graduate Financial Aid page can be found here.
MFA Teaching Fellowships
The MFA Teaching Fellowship is a two-year appointment that provides students with experience in teaching college writing. Teaching fellows spend their first year as interns, assisting an experienced professor with an undergraduate composition course during the fall semester. In the spring semester, all interns and teaching fellows attend a one-day mini-conference on syllabus preparation, grade norming, classroom practices, readings in pedagogy, and classroom experiences. Fellows teach a composition course in their second year. The Fellowship pays a stipend of $2000 in the first year and approximately $5000 in the second.
Internships
Teaching Internships
The Teaching Internship allows students to observe the conduct of a college course and to share the pedagogical activity of the supervising instructor. The student serves as co-teacher with a mentor teacher from the English Department and assists with an undergraduate course in composition, creative writing or literature. The student attends each course session and shares responsibility for instructing the class and responding to students' written work.
MARY
Students can learn about small press internet publishing through internships with MARY, the Program's in-house web publication. Student interns assist with various elements of administration, editing, layout, publicity, and advertising.
Scholarships
The Chester Aaron Scholarships for Excellence in Creative Writing
The Chester Aaron Scholarships are for the amount of $7,000 and go to distinguished candidates in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Chester Aaron is a Professor Emeritus of English at Saint Mary's College and the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Black and Blue Jew, Garlic Is Life, and Garlic Kisses. This award honors his profound service to students at the College and to his lifelong dedication to the written word.
The Alice Bagby Scholarship for Excellence in Poetry
The Alice Bagby Scholarship is $2,000 given annually by an anonymous donor in memory of her grandmother. The scholarship is named after a teacher and missionary, Alice Bagby, who devoted her life to housing and educating young people, especially needy young women, in the southern state of Rio Grande de Sul, Brazil. Alice Bagby was known in the community for her active leadership and for her deeply caring teaching. Completely bilingual in Portuguese and English, she was dedicated to the study of languages and to the life of the spirit in communities far from her family's place of origin in Texas. The scholarship is given to a deserving student whose work will help exemplify the values of spiritual life in language.
Vanessa Bedient and Molly Reidelberger Scholarship for Excellence in Poetry
Vanessa Bedient (née Stribling) grew up in Piedmont, California and attended Scripps College, the University of Washington, and UCLA. She served as the director of Planned Parenthood in Santa Barbara, where her two children were raised, and later in San Francisco. She loved literature and the arts, and was the soul of goodness.
Molly Reidelberger lived in Singapore for a number of years, and volunteered at the Melrose Home for orphaned or abandoned children. She received her paralegal certificate from Saint Mary's and worked as a legal assistant in the San Francisco Bay area for a number of years. In addition, she volunteered at Planned Parenthood for 15 years. This scholarship is for $2,500.
The Elizabeth Bishop Scholarship for Excellence in Poetry
A $2,000 award that goes to a distinguished first-year candidate in poetry each year, this award is made possible by the contributions of several anonymous donors and through a large gift from The Murray and Grace Nissman Foundation. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop was raised by two sets of grandparents in Nova Scotia and New England. She was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer by the time she enrolled at Vassar College, where she co-founded the literary magazine, The Conspirito. After graduating from Vassar, Bishop traveled extensively, settling in Rio de Janeiro from 1951 to 1966. She later went on to teach English and creative writing at the University of Washington and Harvard University. Her poetry, published in such collections as North and South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, won every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
The Agnes Butler Scholarships for Literary Excellence
The Agnes Butler Scholarships are awarded to six distinguished students in the MFA Program. Three awards are granted to distinguished new candidates, and three awards are granted to returning students. The Agnes Butler Scholarships are made possible by the Agnes Butler Endowment for Literary Excellence, which was established in 1998 through two large gifts to the MFA Program. Agnes Butler was the grandmother of an anonymous donor to the program. A southern schoolteacher, Ms. Butler earned her master's degree in English while working as a teacher and raising a family. A beloved and devoted teacher, Agnes Butler instilled in her students a love for literature, especially her favorites, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.
The Jeannine Cooney Scholarship for Excellence in Fiction
The Jeannine Cooney Scholarship is a $4,400 award that goes to a distinguished candidate in fiction admitted to the MFA Program each year. Born in France in 1927, Jeannine Cooney grew up in a small town just north of Paris. Her education was interrupted by the advent of World War II, an event that also spelled the end of her close-knit family. In 1950 Jeannine boarded the Queen Mary bound for the United States to start a new life on her own. She eventually married Terrence Cooney and raised four sons. Throughout her life she was a strong supporter of her children's academic and artistic pursuits. From the earliest days of her youth, when she was first exposed to the music of her beloved Edith Piaf, she was a great lover of the arts. Many times in her life she relied on the aid of others, and it is in her memory that Thomas and Terrence Cooney are proud to offer this scholarship.
The Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Scholarship
This scholarship in the amount of $2,000 is given annually by an anonymous donor in memory of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Born in Mexico City in 1648 and Latin America's finest baroque poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz spent her entire adult life in a convent. She is the author of the poetry collection The Overflowing of the Castalian Spring by the Tenth Muse of Mexico and the Respuesta, in which she describes her intellectual history and defends her rights as a woman to education. Remarkable for her time, Sor Juana discusses the position of women with astonishing frankness, irony, and thinly veiled anger.
The Judith Lee Stronach Scholarship
This $3,000 scholarship is made possible by an anonymous donor and honors the life of Judith Lee Stronach (1943-2002), a writer and activist. Among her considerable accomplishments, Judith was a published poet and an invited columnist for the Turning Wheel and poetry editor for the Enquiring Mind. As a philanthropist Judith was devoted to causes championing Human Rights and since 2000 was an Executive Board Member of Amnesty International.
The Jim Townsend Scholarships for Excellence in Creative Writing
The Jim Townsend Scholarships are for the amount of $7,000 and go to distinguished candidates in fiction and poetry. Jim Townsend was a Professor Emeritus of English at Saint Mary's College. This award honors his profound service to students at the College and to his lifelong dedication to the written word.
