Creative Writing Professor Wins Major Research Grant

A Harvard creative writing professor won a three-year research grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, award officials announced earlier this week.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Briggs-Copeland assistant professor of English and American Literature and Language, was one of 13 winners of the writing awards, which provide $35,000 a year for three years.

"It was a real pleasure," said Klinkenborg, who will take a leave of absence in the 1992-93 academic year to spend time studying Native American and Western medicine.

He said he is currently working on a book about doctors who practice medicine among Native Americans.

Klinkenborg said that he will be working throughout the Southwest, especially in northeastern Arizona, where he hopes to study the Hopi tribe's health care history.

"They are simply wonderfully human," Klinkenborg said. "Their landscape, their culture, their interaction with the clinic and the doctors is very pleasurable to witness."

In addition, Klinkenborg will lead workshops and sponsor public discussions at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, N.M., which is a center for anthropological studies. His affiliation with the school will aid him in his research, he said.

An Ideal Place

The workshops and discussions will focus on health care on Native American reservations. The Fund will cover the costs of these programs with donations of $10,000 per year.

"The school is an ideal place for me because it has real anthropological concerns at heart," Klinkenborg said.

He will return to Harvard in 1993-94 to teach and continue work on his book.

The 1991 awards were won by poets, playwrights, fiction writers and literary non-fiction writers. A fund spokesperson said the awards aim to "bring arts to as many communities as possible."