The Writing Seminars is happy to announce that Olakunle Ologunro (MFA ’24) has been awarded the 2025-2026 Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Fiction at Colgate University. 

The O’Connor Fellowship is an annual fellowship “designed to support writers completing their first books. It provides a generous stipend, office space, and an intellectual community for the recipients, who spend one academic year at Colgate University. In return, each fellow teaches one multigenre creative writing workshop per semester and gives a public reading of their work.”

Ologunro is one of two writers awarded the fellowship for the 2025-2026 session. His book-in-progress was also recently named to the Longlist for the 2025 Deborah Rogers Award. The Deborah Rogers Foundation writes: “the biennial award champions new voices in fiction and non-fiction, offering a £10,000 prize to an unpublished writer to complete their first book, alongside £3,000 each for two shortlisted authors. This year’s longlist of eleven features a vibrant mix of six short story collections and five novels. Writers from Nigeria and Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Bangalore, England and Eire, showcase the breadth and diversity of contemporary writing.”

Olakunle Ologunro is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. He received his MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His writing has been awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Juniper Summer Workshop Scholarship, and nominated for a Pushcart prize. His work has also received support from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Vermont Studio Center, and Aspen Words, where he was named a 2025 Emerging Writer Fellow in Fiction. His stories appear in Story Magazine, Lolwe, the Queer Africa anthology, the Feel Good anthology, and elsewhere.