John Carroll University alumnus Dr. Christopher Kempf ’07 has been awarded a prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kempf was among 223 individuals working across 55 disciplines, chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 5,000 applicants. The Guggenheim Fellowship offers support to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.
The fellowship will support Kempf’s project titled “The Economy,” a book of poems that will articulate the ramifications of speculative financial bubbles on built and natural space. Organized around the Great Recession of 2008, during which he was a house painter, Kempf uses nine long-poems to examine the extension of economic thinking into all aspects of individual and collective life. He gives special attention to how emergent financial instruments affect the experience of place, as with mortgage tranching and the expansion of spec-home suburbia. He also examines the accessibility of financial capitalism through apps like Robinhood and the cultural strategies of predatory inclusion, such as the extension of high-interest credit to finance consumption.
An accomplished and prolific author, Kempf got his start as an undergraduate English major at John Carroll University. He is the author of two poetry collections, including “What Though the Field Be Lost” and “Late in the Empire of Men,” and the scholarly book “Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture.”
Kempf’s writing has earned him significant national recognition, including a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His poetry and literary nonfiction have appeared in Best American Poetry (2020), Boston Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, and Kenyon Review, among others.
“My time at John Carroll absolutely changed my life, from the holistic tenets of Jesuit education broadly to the specific care and consideration and inspiration I received from professors in English like Chris Roark, Phil Metres, George Bilgere, Maryclaire Moroney, and so many others,” said Kempf. “Indeed, I write about John Carroll in one of the books the Fellowship will be supporting.”
Kempf currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches and studies poetry, creative nonfiction, and creative writing.
“Chris Kempf is one of the finest writers I’ve had the opportunity to teach,” said Dr. Phil Metres, Professor of English at John Carroll University. “He doesn’t pretend to have the right answers, or the correct ones, but his work leaves me with the sense of something more valuable: complicated, discomfiting truths. This is interdisciplinary work at its finest—drawing upon history, economics, philosophy, and poetic theory to create a new way of understanding our predicament. This is the kind of writing we desperately need today.”
