Three Mainers were named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows this week.

Fellowships were awarded to Jessica Anthony, an author from Portland who teaches writing at Bates College in Lewiston; Myronn Hardy, a poet from Portland and associate professor of English at Bates; and Samantha Appleton, a former White House photographer from Rockport.

Fellowships were awarded to 223 people working across 55 fields, according to a release Tuesday from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Nearly 5,000 people had applied.

The fellowships come with a monetary award aimed at allowing artists, scientists, scholars and others to pursue independent work. The amount of the awards are not announced, but various published reports have estimated the average is often between $40,000 and $55,000.

Appleton was an official White House photographer during the administration of President Barack Obama and has covered conflicts and social issues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Africa. She said the award will help her complete a project called “Bones of Our Gods,” which she described as being about “American mythology and a reclaiming of important American history in a politically uncertain time.” She plans to photograph important sites around the country.

“Receiving the news about the Guggenheim comes at a critical time for photojournalism and history, the main pillars of my work,” Appleton wrote in an email. “This grant is an affirmation of my life’s work and I am humbled by the recognition and assistance.”

Anthony, a senior lecturer in English at Bates, is the author of four books of fiction, including “The Most,” which was longlisted for a National Book Award in 2024. Her 2020 novel “Enter the Aardvark” was a finalist for the New England Book Award in fiction. On Instagram, Anthony thanked the Guggenheim organization for “this stratospheric honor” and congratulated her Bates faculty colleague, Hardy, who she called a “genius poet.”

“And with this, a dream is realized,” Anthony wrote on Instagram, about the fellowship.

Hardy has authored six volumes of poetry, including “Aurora Americana,” published by Princeton University Press in 2023. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review.

“So grateful for this honor. Now I understand the phrase, the feeling of being ‘over the moon,'” Hardy wrote on Instagram.

The Guggenheim fellowships were established in 1925 by Simon Guggenheim, a former U.S. senator from Colorado in memory of his son, John, who died at the age of 17 as he was set to begin college. Since then, more than $450 million in fellowships have been awarded to more than 19,000 people.