The Arkansas Arts Council has announced the recipients of its 2022 Individual Artist Fellowship awards, and one current graduate student and one alumni of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and translation in the Department of English are among those awarded. Current fiction M.F.A. student Lily Buday and fiction alumna Joy Clark ('20) won two of the three statewide awards in the Literary Arts: Flash Fiction or Flash Creative Nonfiction category.

Buday, of Fayetteville, is a writer of assorted fictions and nonfictions, with work appearing in Chautauqua, GASHER and Joyland. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the U of A, where she has been the recipient of a Harrison/Whitehead Founders' Fellowship and a James E. & Ellen Wadley Roper Fellowship in creative writing.

Clark, of Fayetteville, received her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the U of A, where she currently works for local nonprofits Art Ventures and The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her work can be read in Bayou Magazine, Pleiades, Juked and The Kenyon Review Online, among other places. She is working on a novel.

Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship awards are unconditional, non-matching awards made directly to individual Arkansas artists. Each year, a panel of independent judges selects artists across Arkansas in several categories to receive the $5,000 fellowships. The award is meant to provide artists with funding that will allow them more time to create new work and develop their craft.