Messitt Gets Fellowship to Pursue Missing Person Story

Maggie Messitt

Maggie Messitt, an English doctoral student in the Creative Writing non-fiction program, was awarded the John Cady Fellowship for the 2015-16 school year.

Her project—”Art(i)fact: An Atlas of my Search“—is the story of her aunt, a missing person, and the journey to find her.

In 2009, my aunt, an artist, went missing. That year, there were 719,558 missing persons cases in the United States, but only 96,192 of those were active. The rest were filed away. No one was looking for them and no one, but my family and a private investigator, was looking for my aunt. In May 2013, I started a new search—this time for my aunt’s story. Using 200+ handwritten letters as my map, I became an explorer, a detective, a collector of quotidian details. This intense fieldwork—represented by boxes of collected items, thousands of interview hours, hundreds of images, and a dozen filled notebooks—is the basis of my dissertation titled Art(i)fact: An Atlas of my Search. A hybrid of investigation and memoir, this is the story of my aunt, my journey to find her in the things she left behind (and, subsequently, find myself inside her story), and an exploration of mental illness, creativity, and a life-long search for home. As a John Cady Fellow, I will continue this travel and research and ultimately complete my second book.

Four other Ohio University graduate students also received named fellowships: Melissa Riggs, School of Visual Communication; Justin J. Rudnick, School of Communication Studies; Tyler JC Whidden, School of Theater; and Ashley Howell, Department of Psychology.

Each student was awarded a fellowship of $15,000, plus a full tuition scholarship for fall and spring semesters.

Schools and departments may nominate one graduate student for the competitive program, which is managed by the Ohio University Graduate College. The program features the John Cady Fellowship, the Donald Clippinger Graduate Fellowship, the Claude Kantner Graduate Fellowship, the Anthony Trisolini Graduate Fellowship, and the Graduate College Fellowship. Nominations for the 2016-17 cycle are due in February 2016. Full guidelines and forms are available online.