Rebecca Hazelwood
Photo courtesy of Rebecca Hazelwood
Bio
Rebecca Hazelwood is a writer who is originally from Kentucky. She is currently working on a book about her Appalachian family and her true crime childhood as the daughter of a detective with many demons. Her essays have appeared in Guernica, Passages North, Appalachian Review, PANK, Entropy, December, Still, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as being a finalist for the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Awards and December’s Curt Johnson Prose Award in Nonfiction. She has two BAs from Western Kentucky University, an MFA from Georgia College, and a PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama, with her husband, four stepchildren, mother, and six ferocious, cuddly cats.
When I called one of my best friends to tell her that I’d been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she screamed profanities about how big this was—on speaker—while my 12-year-old stepdaughter was next to me. Sometimes my stepdaughter cheers when she hears curse words, and sometimes she thinks cursing makes you a bad person, and she hasn’t decided what she thinks for sure. I often have to be careful with my language around my youngest stepdaughter, but in this case, I didn’t tell my best friend not to curse. I wanted my stepdaughter to know how monumental this award is (and feels).
I quit my job in academia earlier this year, and though I am glad to have walked away from a job that was giving me panic attacks, I have missed the community. Sometimes I worry about my writing’s value without institutional support (and a salary). Nevertheless, this fall I have combed through newspaper microfilm and court records to piece together the crimes I grew up around for my book. I have spent time thinking about the librarian who shares my mother’s first name; she was murdered when I was a child. I have thought about the man who kidnapped and murdered a car salesman to steal a car and visit his girlfriend in another state. I have thought about my father’s own drug use, alcoholism, and abuse while solving these cases. I have thought about the darkness of my narrative.
However, the NEA Literature Fellowship is a burst of light which reminds me that my writing matters. I want to sincerely thank the NEA for their faith in my work. I will continue writing my book, and I will also carry this boost of confidence with me every day.