Three CUNY educators have been awarded 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the country’s most prestigious honors supporting those in scholarly disciplines and artistic fields.

The new CUNY Guggenheim fellows are associate professor of English at Brooklyn College Helen Philips, College of Staten Island professor of media culture Valerie Tevere and Sigrid Nunez, a Brooklyn College adjunct professor and 2007 Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College.

“We are so proud of these educator-artists as they carry on the tradition of Guggenheim Fellows from the City University of New York,” Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez said. “We are grateful for the bright lights they shine on our University in these challenging times. Their work is known internationally, and collectively they have won many prestigious awards, yet their commitment to our students remains strong. By sharing their extraordinary knowledge and talents with the CUNY community — and the world — they help us fulfill our University’s mission.”

Nunez has published seven novels, has been the recipient of various honors including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University and The New School.

“A crisply philosophical and undervalued novelist,” The New York Times called Nunez in a review of her most recent novel, “The Friend,” which won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

Philips is the author of five books and her most recent novel “The Need,” was long listed for the National Book Award in 2019. Her short story collection, “Some Possible Solutions,” received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award and her novel “The Beautiful Bureaucrat” was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015.

“Thrillingly disturbing, frighteningly insightful about motherhood and love, and spilling over with offhand invention, ‘The Need’ is one of this year’s most necessary novels,” The Guardian said in a book review.

Tevere is a multidisciplinary artist whose collaborations with Angel Nevarez have received various fellowships and grants, including a Creative Capital fellowship and an Art Matters grant.

They have produced new works for the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum and the Paul Kasmin Gallery, all located in New York City.

“Their interests lie in the formation of itinerant, performative, and discursive-based social spaces with works that move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon political agency through lyrics, audio and transmission,” according to Tevere and Nevarez’s website.