Poetry, plays and romance languages. The first of that triumvirate has won a UNCG professor a prestigious national fellowship.

Dr. Mark Smith-Soto, a professor in the Department of Romance Languages who is also a playwright and poet, has received a $20,000, 2005 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Chosen from among 1,600 applicants nationwide to receive the honor, Smith-Soto hopes to use the fellowship to buy time to continue his writing.

His first full-length collection of poetry, “Our Lives Are Rivers,” was published in 2003, and his plays have been produced by the Greensboro Cultural Center and Theatre Orange of the Arts Center of Carborro and Chapel Hill.

Dr. Smith-Soto joins a number of other UNCG faculty members who have received hard-to-obtain humanities fellowships in the past year. Last fall, author and MFA Creative Writing Program professor Michael Parker won an NEA fellowship. Dr. Russ McDonald, of the English department, and Dr. Michael Zimmerman, of the philosophy department, both won National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Poet and MFA Creative Writing Program professor Stuart Dischell won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation of New York. And poet and professor A. Van Jordan won the Whiting Writers’ Award for his second book of poetry, “M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A.”