Furman’s Hecimovich wins Guggenheim, Cullman Fellowships

Furman University English Professor Gregg Hecimovich has received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and a separate residency fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. Both fellowships are in support of his upcoming biography “The Columbia Seven: The Life and Times of the Zealy Daguerreotypes.”

Hecimovich received word about the Cullman Center residency first, but he wasn’t sure he could accept it. Doing so would mean he’d have to take an unpaid leave of absence from his teaching role in the Department of English and move to New York, sans family, for nine months. Despite a stipend for the residency and office digs in NYPL’s flagship Schwarzman Building, the prospect was a stretch. Until more news changed things.

“I was on spring break, working away on my book, ‘The Columbia Seven.’ My wife, Christy, and I were discussing whether we could pull off the Cullman when I got the notice from the Guggenheim Foundation. It felt like fate,” Hecimovich said. “We danced around the house. It was just the boost we needed to afford to go all-in and plan for me to spend next year in NYC working on ‘The Columbia Seven.’”

As a member of the Guggenheim Fellows’ centennial class, Hecimovich received a grant to support independent work under “the freest possible conditions” he said, citing the terms of the grant. His book was the only biography honored by the foundation out of nearly 200 awardees. “I’m really proud that the award recognizes and supports excellence in writing biography,” Hecimovich said.

In “The Columbia Seven,” which will be published by Simon & Schuster, Hecimovich is piecing together the life stories of seven enslaved South Carolinians whose images were frozen in time in the 1800s as daguerreotypes. They are considered among the first images of enslaved people ever recorded. He aims to have the work completed by September 2026, a target made all the more achievable with the help of his editor, Dawn Davis, whom Hecimovich calls “the best editor in publishing.”

Hecimovich said neither the Cullman nor the Guggenheim fellowship would have come to fruition without the acclaim received by the book he released in 2023 “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative.”

Hecimovich released “The Life and Times” (Ecco/HarperCollins) in 2023.

Both fellowships are intended for mid-career professionals who have already made significant contributions in the literary world. “Without what I learned and how I grew as a writer in producing ‘The Life and Times,’ the fellowships would have been out of reach,” Hecimovich said, adding that best-in-class editing was key to the book’s success.

“I am thrilled Professor Hecimovich is building on the momentum of ‘The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,’” said Dean of Faculty Jeremy Cass. “His scholarship is steeped in the liberal arts experience, and it delights me that this work is of benefit to the entire university community, especially our students.”

Since his arrival at Furman in 2018, Hecimovich’s students have collaborated on “The Columbia Seven.”

“My students and I have spent hours poring over documents in the South Carolina State Archives and engaging community history in Columbia,” he said. “The best way to draw in college students is to include them in ground-breaking research that matters.” It’s all part of The Furman Advantage, an approach to higher education that provides undergraduates hands-on learning experiences.

Hecimovich will get a boost from yet another fellowship before he begins his Cullman Center work in June. He received the Willam Gilmore Simms Visting Research Professorship at the University of South Carolina, where he’ll spend the month of May doing archival work and community outreach.

“Real history is always in the mouths of the living, and I can’t wait to conduct interviews related to my research in Columbia,” Hecimovich said.