Paul Lisicky Wins a Guggenheim

Paul Lisicky, whose new book, “The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship,” has drawn an inordinate amount of praise and attention, including the full treatment from The New York Times (a weekday review followed by one in the Sunday supplement a month later), has won a Guggenheim fellowship. The category is creative arts, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s website, with general nonfiction listed as his field of study. 

One hundred and seventy-five fellowships were awarded earlier this month, chosen from among almost 3,000 applicants. The fellowships are intended as an encouragement for further work from those who have already established themselves as artists, writers, and scholars. In Mr. Lisicky’s case, he will work on “Stay: A Memoir of Provincetown,” which is about his time there in the early 1990s, when he was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and the AIDS epidemic was at its worst. 

“Many of those who lived in town were already ill,” he says on the website, “having come from other places to spend their last years in a supportive community, on a narrow strip of land surrounded on three sides by water.”

Mr. Lisicky lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the M.F.A program in creative writing at Rutgers University’s Camden, N.J., campus. Until his divorce from the poet Mark Doty a few years ago, he spent summers and weekends in Springs.