Ricardo Nuila and Domingo Martinez have been awarded the 2017-2018 Dobie Paisano writing fellowships sponsored by the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.
The fellowships allow writers to spend four to six months at the Paisano Ranch, J. Frank Dobie’s 254-acre retreat west of Austin, now owned and maintained by The University of Texas at Austin. The fellowships provide solitude, time and a comfortable place for Texas writers or writers who have written significantly about Texas.
Ricardo Nuila is the recipient of the Ralph A. Johnston Memorial Fellowship. A doctor, teacher, and writer, he works as a hospitalist in Houston's largest safety net hospital, where he also teaches internal medicine and medical humanities as an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. His journalism on health disparities has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic websites, as well as in VQR and The New England Journal of Medicine. Ricardo's fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, and Ninth Letter. He won the inaugural New England Review Award for Emerging Writers and has attended the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences as a tuition scholar.
Domingo Martinez will receive the Jesse H. Jones Creative Writing Fellowship. He is the New York Times Best Selling author of The Boy Kings of Texas, a finalist for The National Book Award in 2012, and the critically acclaimed My Heart Is A Drunken Compass. The Boy Kings of Texas is a Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award, a Non-Fiction Finalist for The Washington State Book Awards, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The New Republic, Saveur Magazine, Huisache Literary Magazine, Epiphany Literary Journal, and he is a regular contributor to This American Life and NPR's All Things Considered. He’s appeared on The Diane Rehm Show, and was the recipient of the Bernard De Voto Fellowship for Non-Fiction at Bread Loaf Writer’s Colony in 2013, and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
The Boy Kings of Texas has been optioned by House of Heath, an Academy Award winning film and television production company (Still Alice, Best Actress 2014, Julianne Moore) out of London.