Leslie Pietrzyk, whose first collection of short stories, The Angel on My Chest, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, was selected over 193 applicants to be the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow. The fellowship consists of a $1000 prize from The John Updike Society and a two-week residency at the casitas formerly owned by John and Martha Updike, where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner spent time golfing and writing in his later years. The casitas, located in the Santa Catalina Foothills, are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, and the annual residency is made possible by their generosity. (Photo: Wikipedia)
While at the casitas, Pietrzyk will work on Nothing to See Here, a collection of linked stories about a neighborhood girl who disappears from a Midwestern town, written not as a police procedural or Gone Girl mystery, but rather to address the “emotional impact of growing up in a time and place where girls and women disappear.” She talks briefly about her project in this interview.
Lead judge Robert M. Luscher, an Updike society board member, praised Pietrzyk for tackling a “variety of significant cultural issues in its metaphoric critique of female disappearance. Though these stories of peripheral, collateral damage are set in the 1970s, sadly their themes are even more relevant today than the time during which the stories take place.”
The porches at the casitas, where Updike liked to write while looking at a spectacular view of Tucson.
John Updike was the subject of Pietrzyk’s senior creative writing project at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. in English/Creative writing from Northwestern and an M.F.A. from American University. Currently teaching in the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program in Spartanburg, S.C., Pietrzyk has published three novels (Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl), one historical novel (Reversing the River), and two short story collections (This Angel on My Chest and Admit This to No One). Her story “Stay There” won a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and she was named co-winner of the Polish American Historical Association’s 2020 Creative Arts Prize for promoting “an awareness of the Polish experience in the Americas” through her fiction. Previously she completed residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Wolff Cottage (in Fairhope, Ala.), The Hambidge Center, and an ARGS Residency in St. Petersburg, Va.
Three judges for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship competition considered the quality of project, quality of writing sample, potential benefit to Updike studies or generating awareness, publication potential, and previous publications or relevant biographical details. Pietrzyk is the second recipient. The first was Dr. Sue Norton, a Technological University Dublin lecturer whose project was a critical essay, “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus.”
The annual competition is open to all writers, with the residency offered two weeks in May. Applications for the 2026 competition are due Nov. 1, 2025. See the John Updike Society website for details.