National Endowment for the Arts recognizes MFA fiction writing student

Dave Morris, a graduate student in UCI’s MFA fiction writing program, has won a $25,000 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The fellowship recognizes writers and provides funding for them to produce new work. Morris has worked in a television factory, as a rock climbing guide, a bike messenger, a photographer and a Marine infantry officer. He has covered the war in Iraq for Salon.com and the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2003 as an embedded reporter, and is currently working on a memoir of the Iraq war. Morris is author of Storm on the Horizon: KhafjiThe Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War (Free Press). His piece, published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and titled “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground” was chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007.