Poet Christian Barter, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and author Whitney Terrell will spend this year at Princeton pursuing independent projects as Hodder Fellows hosted by the Lewis Center for the Arts.

The Hodder Fellowship was created for artists in the early stages of their careers and is awarded to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional promise but have not yet received widespread recognition. Typically, Hodder Fellows are poets, playwrights, novelists, creative nonfiction writers and translators who are undertaking significant new work.

This year’s Hodder Fellows will read from their work at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in the Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau St., as part of the Program in Creative Writing’s Althea Ward Clark Reading Series.

Barter’s first collection of poetry, “The Singers I Prefer,” was a finalist for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Prize administered by the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, North American Review and The American Scholar, among other publications. He works as a trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine.

McCraney has written several plays, including “The Brother/Sister Plays: The Brothers Size,” “In the Red and Brown Water” and “Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet.” His works have been staged around the United States as well as in the United Kingdom and Spain. McCraney received the 2007 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from the Vineyard Theater and a 2007 Whiting Writing Award for emerging writers. He also has been named the international writer in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company for 2008-10 and is continuing a seven-year residency at the New Dramatists playwright center in New York City.

Terrell, a 1991 Princeton alumnus, is the author of “The Huntsman,” which was named a New York Times notable book in 2001, and “The King of Kings County,” which was selected as a best book of 2005 by The Christian Science Monitor. He was named one of 20 “writers to watch” under 40 by members of the National Book Critics Circle. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Details and The New York Observer and on National Public Radio. In 2006, he embedded with the U.S. Army in Baghdad. Terrell is the New Letters Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.