Associate Professor of English Tracy O'Neill was honored with a 2025 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Writing. The Fellows are chosen through a competitive nomination and jury process for each discipline: visual arts, writing, and composing. The six-week summer residency fellowship is fully funded and includes travel, room and board, studio, and work space.

Professor O'Neill writes, “At Civitella Ranieri, I was allowed the kind of freedom to be, create, and think that I haven’t experienced since being a student. This capacious way of being was so needed and helped me to reconnect with a dreamier way of life more compatible with art-making and experimentation.”

At Civitella, Tracy “began to think about writing three different books about three different outsider women at middle age ” and explored one of those outsider lives—a woman, middle-aged and battling addiction.