Eighteen artists in North Carolina are recipients of the 2009–2010 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Awards in the categories of musical composition and literary arts.
"Fellowships are a tangible acknowledgment of the important work that artists create in our communities," said Mary B. Regan, executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council. "Artists enhance our culture and enliven our economy. They deserve acclaim and affirmation for the positive impact they make in the lives of North Carolinians."
Recipients were selected by discipline-specific panels comprised of experienced writers, composers and songwriters. Since the program's inception in 1980, more than 500 artists have received awards.
The Artist Fellowship program operates on a two-year rotating cycle by discipline. While jazz and classical music composers, songwriters, playwrights, screenwriters, spoken-word artists and writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction and literary translation were selected for awards this year, applications are being accepted through Nov. 2 for choreographers, craft, film and video and visual artists for next year's grants.
As creative workers comprise more than four percent of North Carolina's total employment with total wages of more than $3.9 billion artists are an asset to our communities. Additionally, their work promotes cross-cultural understanding and continued learning through the arts.
The fellowship recipients are:
Joseph Bathanti, fiction writer (Vilas, Watauga County)
Joseph Bathanti is a professor of creative writing & co-director of Appalachian State University's Visiting Writers Series. His collection of short stories, "The High Heart," was chosen as the St. Andrews College (Laurinburg, N.C.) One Book, One Community 2008 Summer Reading Book. This year, he received the 100 Scholars Research Award given annually by ASU to recognize exemplary research or creative activities of a tenured faculty member. He served as guest editor of the inaugural issue of The Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, Leadfoot Press. (Detroit, MI), Spring 2009. He's now writing the second novel in a trilogy that began with the novel, "East Liberty," set in the nearly vanished little Italy in Pittsburgh where he grew up. Spanning 1955 to 1963, it is about Bobby Renzo, the narrator and main character; and Francene Renzo, his mysterious mother who had him out of wedlock. Bathanti, a former N.C. Arts Council Visiting Artist, is the author of book on the history of the program, "They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina's Visiting Artists 1971ndash;1995." He also won an artist fellowship in 1995.
Ryland Bowman, poet (Greensboro, Guilford County)
Ryland Bowman is an English lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and a MFA in Creative Writing from UNC-Greensboro. He has also served as poetry editor of the Greensboro Review. His poems have appeared in several publications including "New South," "Backwards City Review" and Firecan Press "Miniposte Series # 2." In 2006, he received the Noel Callow/American Academy of Poets Prize. Bowman is currently working on his first poetry collection.
Krista Bremer, writer (Carrboro, Orange County)
Krista Bremer is a non-fiction writer and the wife of a North African Muslim. She writes from the viewpoint of an American writer whose country is at war with two Muslim nations. She likes to explore the profound differences and surprising common ground between Muslim and American cultures through the lens of her marriage. Bremer received the 2009 Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, a national literary award of $25,000 dedicated to emerging women writers. Her work has been anthologized in the 2009 edition of the "Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses" and in The Sun Magazine anthology, "Mysterious Life Of The Heart: Writings from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love." Her essay "My Accidental Jihad" was cited as notable spiritual writing in 2008 edition of "The Best American Spiritual Writing."
David Crowe, composer (Charlotte, Mecklenburg County)
David Crowe is a classical music composer, conductor, percussionist and teaching artist. For several years, he composed music for the Moving Poets Theater of Dance, an innovative dance/theater company. Several scores for its productions feature an eclectic ensemble comprised of flute, cello, classical guitar, and electric bass, Middle Eastern and ethnic percussion. His "Mill Village: A Piedmont Rhapsody," written for the Charlotte Symphony, has received numerous performances in N.C., S.C. and V.A.
Sandra Deer, playwright (Brevard, Transylvania County)
Sandra Deer is a playwright and a senior teacher of "Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method of Finding Your Authentic Voice." She's currently working on two new plays. "The Daughters of Beulah" revisits the Vaughnum family of her first play, "So Long on Lonely Street," which premiered at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta and went on to Broadway and to The Palace Theater in Watford, England. Her current play is "Jocasta Descending," a work about a meeting in the Underworld between Jocasta, the infamous wife and mother of King Oedipus, and Persephone, queen of Hades.
Laurelyn Dossett, songwriter (Greensboro, Guilford County)
Laurelyn Dossett writes new songs rooted in traditional Southern folk music. Her song, "Anna Lee," written for Greensboro's Triad Stage's "Brother Wolf," was recorded by Levon Helm and is included on the "Dirt Farmer" CD. "Dirt Farmer" won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in 2007. This year, Dossett appeared with Polecat Creek on the radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." She also toured with the North Carolina Symphony performing several pieces, including her song "Remember My Name." She's writing songs for the 2010 premiere of "Providence Gap," her fourth collaboration with playwright Preston Lane, artistic director of Triad Stage.
Chad Eby, jazz composer (Greensboro, Guilford County)
Chad Eby is an assistant professor of Jazz Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He completed a Master's Degree in Saxophone Performance from Ohio State University. While in Ohio, Eby released his first album, Triptych, in 2000 which garnered critical acclaim from AllAboutJazz.com and fellow saxophonists such as Branford Marsalis and Wessel Anderson. His new CD "Broken Shadows" featuring Steve Haines, Doug Wamble, Jason Marsalis, and Branford Marsalis will be available in November. He will be recording his third CD in 2010 with Steve Haines, Jason Marsalis, Ryan Kisor and Will Campbell.
Brenda Flanagan, fiction writer (Davidson, Mecklenburg County)
Brenda Flanagan is the Edward Armfield Professor of English at Davidson College. Flanagan, a Trinidad native, is the author of the award-winning novel, "You Alone Are Dancing" and its sequel, "Allah in the Islands," as well as a forthcoming collection of short stories, "In Praise of Island Women and Other Crimes." Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Caliban, Calalloo, the Caribbean Review and the Indiana Review. She's now working on a non-fiction book entitled, "A Year with the Diva, Nina Simone."
Holly Iglesias, poet (Asheville, Buncombe County)
Holly Iglesias teaches in the Master of Liberal Arts Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She has two poetry collections, "Souvenirs of a Shrunken World" (Kore Press, 2008) and "Angles of Approach" (White Pine Press, forthcoming in 2011), and a critical work, "Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry" (Quale Press, 2004). She has published translations of the poems of award-winning Cuban poet, Caridad Atencio. Her current projects are "Walking to Cuba," poems based on her experiences as a transplanted Midwesterner in the Cuban exile community in Miami, and "Boom," which looks at civil defense manuals aimed at housewives in the 1950s.
Shara Lessley, poet (Edenton, Chowan County)
Shara Lessley is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her awards include the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from University of Wisconsin, The Gilman School's Tickner Fellowship, and the Discovery/ "The Nation" prize. Lessley's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, New South, Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Lessley is the recipient of a John Ciardi Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Moondancer's Fellowship in Nature and Outdoor Writing from The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow and Isotope's 2009 Editor's Prize. She's currently exploring in verse the history of labor and loss that appear in historical photographs and correspondence.
Stephanie H. Levin, poet (Chapel Hill, Orange County)
Stephanie H. Levin teaches courses in creative writing through Johns Hopkins University's CTYOnline program. Her poetry manuscript, "My Mother's Inventions," was a 2005 finalist for The Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and for the Elixir Press Fifth Annual Poetry Awards. Her poems have appeared in the Winter 2004 edition of MARGIE: Journal of American Poetry, as well as in Shenandoah and Prairie Schooner. Many of Levin's poems explore the beauty and mystery of the spiritual beliefs with which she was raised alongside the gritty, dark happenings in her family. She continues to find the juxtaposition of the two ironic and compelling. She's working on a new manuscript of poetry that will delve into significant endings in her life: the death of her brother and the collapse of her marriage, both of which she wants to explore through the use of seemingly mundane events, such as grocery shopping or signing up for basic cable. In her new work, she hopes to experiment more with formal verse. Though she loves narrative poetry, she wants to see what happens when the stories she wants to tell knock against the constraints of meter and rhyme.
Sharon McNeill, writer (Alexander, Buncombe County)
Sharon McNeill is a writer, freelance photographer and the founder and director of Moonshine Cards. She creates environmental, nature-themed greeting cards distributed nationally through retail outlets and online. McNeill is working on a mystical adventure novel for young adults. "Gemma's Journeys," is the story of a girl who finds herself in a mystery that spans lifetimes. As she prepares to travel from New York City to Ocracoke Island, N.C. a small piece of the puzzle surrounding her birth, deep in the Balkan Mountains, is revealed. The character is given the only link to her past, an obsidian necklace.
Katherine Min, fiction writer (Asheville, Buncombe County)
Katherine Min teaches creative writing workshops and literature courses at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She served as a panelist at the 2009 North Carolina Literary Festival in Chapel Hill. Her short story, "The Music Lover," was published in the anthology "Long Story Short." She was also a finalist for The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers, which honors "an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a novel or collection of short stories—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. This was for her novel, "Secondhand World."
She's now working on her second novel, "The Fetishist."
John Salmon, jazz composer (Summerfield, Guilford County)
John Salmon is a classical and a jazz pianist. His four commercially released CDs (on the Phoenix and Naxos labels) include the piano compositions of American jazz pianist Dave Brubeck and Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin. He combines a classical musician's perspective on the thick, written-out scores with a jazzman's sense of swing. His next recording project reflects this classical/jazz background but with two twists: He's working on a CD of his own compositions and he will overdub himself on every track. His new recording will feature his polyphonic pieces "Fughetta on Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Bossa Bachiana," two works that blend jazz and classical music in a style reminiscent of the "third stream" endeavors of Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano. This CD should be released in early 2011.
Robert Anthony Siegel, fiction writer (Wilmington, New Hanover County)
Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of two novels, "All Will Be Revealed" and "All The Money in the World." He was educated at Harvard, the University of Tokyo and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His short work has appeared in Story, Oxford American and Ecotone, among other places and has been anthologized most recently in "Nerve: The First Ten Years." His awards include a Paul Engle post-graduate fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Education and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Tamara Titus, fiction writer (Charlotte, Mecklenburg County)
Tamara Titus is a freelance writer and editor who recently won third place in the "Meet the Authors Contest" sponsored by The Writers' Workshop in Asheville. For the past five years she has reviewed books for The Charlotte Observer. Her fiction can be found in Rock & Sling, Sou'wester and Glimmer Train Stories, among others. Currently, she is working on a novel set in the Carville leprosarium in Louisiana during the first half of the 20th century. Several years ago she came across an article about the closing of Carville leprosarium and was haunted by the history of that unique place. Over time, she recognized the recurring themes of identity and otherness in her work.
Christopher Turner, screenwriter (Apex, Wake County)
Christopher Turner is the co-founder of Escape Hatch Studios and senior content strategist for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, where he develops Web, TV and video concepts and manages content creation for the company's Web site. Turner's pilot script "Vidiots" has been submitted to the BBC for development. The pilot is for a comedy/drama series about employees in a video store during the early 1990s. He's also completed the script for "Waryville," a Web comic set to debut in 2010. His current project is "Woodland Park," a bittersweet coming-of-age tale that focuses on a teenager who develops a strange condition that promises great power, but at great cost to his family and friends.
Isabel Zuber, fiction writer and poet (Winston-Salem, Forsyth County)
Isabel Zuber's first novel, "Salt" received the Virginia Commonwealth University First Novelist Award in 2003. In 2004, Zuber was invited to be a reader/presenter at the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium in Mississippi, and the following year "Salt" was chosen for the inaugural reading in the Boone Southern Writers Series at Barton College. She's now revising her second novel, "Rowing the Destroyer," a story set in a small Southern textile town in the 1930s and 1940s. It is centered on Will Bryant, a small child brought by his father to live with his four young aunts and his grandmother when his mother abruptly deserts the family. It is a character-driven story with a strong sense of history and place. Zuber is also revising a new poetry collection, "Red Lily," and a short story collection, "Palaces of Instruction."
