The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs has recognized David L. Ulin, adjunct associate professor at the UCR Palm Desert low-residency MFA program, for his literary contributions.

Ulin is part of this year’s City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project, or COLA-IMAP, cohort. Each of the 10 recipients will produce a new body of work with grants of $10,000 each. The work will be premiered by the City of Los Angeles in spring 2023.

“I’m grateful to the City of Los Angeles, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, both for their support to develop new work and because so much of my work has been grounded in Southern California,” said Ulin, former Los Angeles Times book critic and current editor at Air/Light, an online literary journal, and books editor at Alta, the quarterly West Coast journal. “It means a lot to be recognized by the place you call home.” 

COLA-IMAP “honors the synergetic relationship between Los Angeles, its creative fields, the spectrum of local talent, our collective cultural history, and LA’s stature as an international center for creative entrepreneurship.”

Ulin is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and the author or editor of 10 books, including “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” the novella “Labyrinth,” and “The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time.”