The South Carolina Academy of Authors is pleased to announce Jo Angela Edwins as the 2014 winner of the 5th Annual Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship in Poetry. Edwins teaches composition, American literature and creative writing at Francis Marion University in Florence. Her poems have been published in various venues including New South, Calyx, Sojourn, and Naugatuck River Review.
The Nickens Fellowship was established in 2009 to support South Carolina poets whose work employs skilled verse composition and reflects a heightened awareness of the human condition. The submission period for the fellowship is in the autumn of each year.
This year's judge, Lavonne J. Adams, commented that Edwins' winning entry consists of "poems that have a coherence of voice--poems that speak to one another, that echo in a manner that makes me feel as if I have experienced a much lengthier collection. The author exhibits mastery of form--a gracious breaking of line and stanza--which enhances the language, the imagery, and the sound devices, all delightfully tactile."
Adams also praised the quality of the entries saying, "I believe that when we read poetry, we look for a narrative voice that we can trust, the chance to delight in how another perceives the world--insight into a moment turned luminescent. Inside each carefully crafted poem, this poet provides us with those opportunities. This is art to treasure."
Adams is author of Through the Glorieta Pass (Pearl Editions) and teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the recipient of the Persephone Poetry Prize for her chapbook Everyday Still Life, and the Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Chapbook Award for In the Shadow of the Mountain. She has published in over ?fty additional venues, including Prairie Schooner, Missouri Review, Cincinnati Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Harwood Museum of Art.
For more information, please contact Libby Bernardin, South Carolina Academy of Authors board member and fellowship coordinator at libbypoet@gmail.com.
