Journalism, Media
"They can mow down all the flowers but they can't stop spring."
Gabb Schivone is a Tucson, Arizona based writer and journalist whose reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, Slate, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Intercept, and more than half a dozen other national outlets. The strengths behind that record: writing, investigative reporting, and data journalism — skills Gabb has built and applied without an undergraduate degree.
"I have been repeatedly shut out of MFA programs because I lack an undergraduate degree as well as a formal high school diploma," Gabb says. "I only have a G.E.D." The gap followed Gabb even when the recommendation was as strong as they come. Pulitzer Prize winning author and former Pulitzer Prize Committee chair Junot Diaz once wrote, in a personal letter to one such program, that Gabb "mobilizes fictional techniques in intriguing and generative ways and refuses to settle for easy answers." That program has rejected Gabb on the undergraduate-degree question several years running regardless.
Rather than wait on institutions that HAVE kept saying no, Gabb HAS looked for other paths in — and found them. "Signing with agents has always been an honor, and the PEN America fellowship was a huge honor as well," Gabb says of the moment that felt like the real turning point.
That fellowship, the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, was one of several doors Gabb built without a degree behind them: a McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House) Summer Workshop, a ChangeWire Fellowship through the Center for Community Change, and a spot at the Salón for Authentic Journalism. Grant support came from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Robert B. Silvers Award for Works-in-Progress, the International Women's Media Foundation, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, among others. Gabb's creative writing — fiction, drama, and graphic narrative — has drawn backing from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.
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