The Oxford American has selected the inaugural Jeff Baskin Writer’s Fellow. Molly McCully Brown, who just completed her MFA at Ole Miss University in Oxford, MS, was introduced on June 2 at the Argenta Community Theater in North Little Rock as the first recipient of the $10,000 prize.

“ACANSA is thrilled to be a part of underwriting this vital and important new fellowship, which received over 90 applicants from around the country in its first year of existence,” said Dillon Hupp, ACANSA’s Executive Director. “Jeff was a tremendous friend of the arts in Central Arkansas, and particularly to emerging writers through the groundbreaking Laman Library Writers Fellowship. We are honored that Jeff’s legacy will continue to live on through this new fellowship, and we are beyond excited to welcome Molly into our community and to see what she creates.”

Brown’s winning manuscript is entitled “What We Are,” a collection of personal essays that Brown calls “my evolving understanding of the intersection between the physical body and that intangible other I have come to call the soul.”

For more information, check out this Arkansas Times article on Brown.