By Michelle Hines , University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted: 8-28-07
Jennifer Grotz.
GREENSBORO, N.C. – Poet Jennifer Grotz, who teaches in the MFA Writing Program, has won a prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
Grotz’s award is one of six given for 2007. It comes with a $25,000 grant.
The Jaffe Foundation independently selects the recipients from the brightest new lights among women writers. No applications or nominations are accepted.
Grotz serves as assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Her first collection of poems, “Cusp,” won the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2003. She joined UNCG’s MFA Writing Program in Fall 2006.
Her award will allow her to take advantage of a Camargo Fellowship in France next spring and to complete her second book of poems. Her second manuscript comes out of her fascination with contemporary Polish poetry.
Rona Jaffe, who died in 2005, wrote 16 books, including the bestselling internationally acclaimed novels “The Road Taken” and “The Cousins.” She founded the Jaffe Foundation, the only national literary awards program dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively, in 1995. The foundation has awarded more than $750,000 to 86 women.
