Recent graduate of Florida State University English earns prestigious creative writing fellowship

A two-time Florida State University English alumnus and recent graduate has been awarded a highly competitive early-career creative writing award from Stanford University.

Daniel Sutter, who earned his doctoral degree in creative writing in Spring 2025, is one of 10 recipients chosen for the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford from a pool of about 2,000 applicants. The fellowship will support Sutter’s work for two years.  

“I got a phone call from a California number, and when I answered, the director of creative writing at Stanford introduced himself as Nicholas Jenkins and said ‘We’d like to see you in California. We can’t wait for you to come to Stanford,’” Sutter said. “When I hung up, it took me quite a while to realize it was a real phone call because this is such a unique, cool honor to receive.” 

Winners receive a $75,000 stipend per year to be artists-in-residence and develop their writing in the company of peers and under the guidance of Stanford faculty members. Sutter will begin his fellowship at Stanford in Fall 2025, fine-tuning his dissertation novel “Orders of Magnitude,” which he has defended, and working on his second novel. 

“This opportunity is validating of the work I’m currently doing in my writings about the Gulf Coast and has given me confidence in my projects,” Sutter said. “Earning the fellowship is also humbling because I get to work in this space alongside tremendous writers.”  

“Orders of Magnitude” takes place over the span of 20 years and follows the journey of a man trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter through the Gulf South. The novel explores significant American cultural moments, including the Iraq War, the debut of the iPhone, social media, Zika, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, self-celebrity, religiosity run amok, the evolution of political propaganda and the War of 1812. 

Sutter, from Tampa, Florida, earned his bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing from FSU in 2014 before going on to earn a master’s in creative writing from the University of New Orleans in 2018. His writings focus on respect of place, especially the Gulf Coast where he grew up.   

“I have something to say about the people of these places because I’ve spent my entire life in the region, and I enjoy exploring the Gulf as a liminal space between order and chaos,” Sutter said. “I find many people who live near the Gulf are perceived as eccentric or strange because of their alertness to extremes when, in reality, they’re actually survivalists. It’s an adventure here. A hurricane could arrive tomorrow, or it could freeze for three days in the same season. That makes for a compelling cast and stage in my works.” 

For his fellowship application, Sutter submitted two short stories. “Mantis” is about an agoraphobic son who lives with his mother in Tampa, and “Like Always Blooming” is a story about a father and daughter living in New Orleans. Sutter’s short story collection, “Like Always Blooming,” recently won the Press 53 Short Fiction Award and will be published by Press 53 in May 2026.  

In earning this fellowship, Sutter joins the ranks of Stegner Fellows with FSU ties including Associate Professor of English Skip Horack, creative writing instructor Russ Franklin, and FSU doctoral students Matthew Denton-Edmundson and Christell Victoria Roach. FSU English alumnus and Stanford professor of creative writing Adam Johnson completed the fellowship in 2001, the same year he earned his doctorate from FSU. Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2013 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2015.

To learn more about the FSU Department of English, visit english.fsu.edu.

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