Two Vermonters, both members of the faculty at Dartmouth College, have been awarded prestigious fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Vievee Francis, of White River Junction, is an award-winning poet and associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth. Francis's fourth book, The Shared World, which Seven Days ' Jim Schley reviewed last April, is currently a finalist for a 2024 Vermont Book Award.

Francis is currently researching and writing her fifth book, a collection of poems and considerations titled Cleaning the Houses of the Dead.



“I am looking at the idea of labor and of cleaning — everything from maid culture to ideas around ethnic cleansing,” Francis said, in a written statement from Dartmouth College. “I’m looking at what we consider to be unclean, and how we use ideas around cleanliness to do great harm. I want to start a discussion about how to mitigate some of that harm and begin to rethink some very old and embedded thinking around whose labors matter and who gets to decide who is worth being here or not.”

Francis, a Texas native who's been at Dartmouth since 2016, called the Guggenheim fellowship "affirming. It lets me know my work is being seriously considered.”

Laura Ogden, of South Strafford, is a Dartmouth professor of anthropology and special adviser to the college's provost on climate and sustainability. Honored for her work on conservation, environmental change and colonialism, Ogden has conducted ethnographic research in the Florida Everglades, Tierra del Fuego and urban environments throughout the United States.

Calling the Guggenheim award “an enormous honor and a rare moment of feeling like my work is on the right path,” Ogden said she plans to use the fellowship to complete her current project, The Book of Birds: A Memoir of Extinction, about the conservation effort, which began in the 1980s, to save the California condor from extinction.

Francis and Ogden were among 188 winners of Guggenheim fellowships, chosen from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants throughout the United States and Canada. The financial grants, which vary from fellow to fellow and are not made public, are meant to provide the recipients with considerable time and freedom to pursue their work.