Two UNC Greensboro faculty members and one alumna have received 2019 North Carolina Arts Council fellowships. Eighteen artists across North Carolina received awards in the literary categories of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting and playwriting and in the musical categories of composition and songwriting. Recipients were selected by panels comprised of artists and arts professionals with discipline-specific expertise and experience.
Emilia Phillips is an assistant professor in UNCG’s MFA in Creative Writing program, a poet, and a nonfiction writer.
She is the author of three collections of poetry, including “Empty Clip” and “Groundspeed” from the University of Akron Press, and three chapbooks, including “Hemlock” from Diode Editions and “Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike,” from Bull City Press. In 2019, she received a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Pathetic Fallacy,” and her lyric nonfiction piece, “Excisions,” was awarded a 2015 Storyquarterly Nonfiction Prize.
Phillips will use the grant to fund experiential research and residencies toward the completion of a lyric essay collection. Her two current nonfiction projects, “Wound Revisions: Lyric Memoirs” and “Rewilding: On Queerness, Family, and Body,” examine reconstructive surgery, gun violence, queer families, and troublesome namesakes.
“My writing, both poetry, and nonfiction is concerned with the ways in which our bodies embody violence,” says Emilia Phillips, “whether it’s physical and externalized (as is the case with bruises and scars) or emotional and internalized (homophobia, misogyny, etc.).”
Steve Haines is director of the Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program in UNCG’s School of Music, a post he has held for the past 20 years.
The first album he created as a leader was “Beginner’s Mind,” in 2003, and next was “Stickadiboom.” He also wrote the music for the musical “Ella: The Life And Music of Ella Fitzgerald.” His fourth and latest CD as a leader is Steve Haines and the Third Floor Orchestra, which was released by Justin Time Records in 2019.
“For this project,” said Haines. “I had the focal points of Becca Stevens, Chad Eby, and Joey Calderazzo. I sought to wrap the orchestra around their sounds like a warm blanket.”
Haines also won the N.C. Arts Council Fellowship in musical composition in 2008. He was also named Outstanding Teacher of the Year for the UNCG School of Music in 2006, received a semi-finalist ranking for the 2010 Jazz Knights Commission in New York, and won the 2019 UNCG Gladys Strewn Bullard Award for leadership and service.
With support from the fellowship, Haines plan on making an album of holiday music with fellow colleague, vocalist, and jazz pianist Ariel Pocock.
Jennie Malboeuf graduated from UNCG’s MFA in Creative Writing program and her poetry examines issues of authority, control, and violence and how these themes intersect with gender, sexuality, and memory.
“Ultimately, the objective of my writing is to explore the relationships between the body (animal) and the mind (God),” says Malboeuf.
Her latest book, “God had a body,” was awarded the 2019 Blue Light Books Prize and is forthcoming in the spring of 2020 from Indiana University Press and the Indiana Review. Malboeuf’s poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and The Southern Review, among other places. She received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for her poem, “Hubris” (first published in New South) in 2019 and has been named twice to the Best New Poets list, a series featuring emerging writers published by the University of Virginia Press.
Malboeuf will use the grant to give her time to work on a new book of poetry and also to travel to give readings at various colleges, universities, festivals and bookstores for the release of “God had a body.”
Compiled by Susan Kirby-Smith
