Bar Harbor native wins PEN writer’s fellowship

NEW YORK – The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowships for Writers has honored Bar Harbor native Carolyn Cooke as a fiction writer whose debut work – a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2000 or 2001 – represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.

As a fellow, she will receive a stipend of $35,000 a year for two consecutive years to help in the writing of a second work of fiction and will engage in a project of public schools literary service that brings authors and their works to settings outside the mainstream. Schools, adult educational programs and literacy centers serving low-income communities will be among the venues served by the PEN/Bingham fellows’ visits in order to introduce three distinctive talents to audiences that may never have met a writer or attended a live reading.

Cooke is author of “The Bostons” (Mariner Books-Houghton Mifflin). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the “Paris Review,” “Ploughshares” and “The Nation” and her stories have been featured in “The Best American Short Stories” and “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.” The nine stories in her collection, “The Bostons,” switch between the locations of Boston and Maine. She lives in Point Arena, Calif.