By Michelle Hines, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 2-5-09
GREENSBORO, N.C. – Poet Stuart Dischell has won a $25,000 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowship.
He was one of only 42 poets chosen to receive NEA grants for 2009.
Dischell, who teaches in the MFA Program, also won an NEA Fellowship in 1996 as well as a 2004 award from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
The recent NEA grant will allow him to set aside time for writing, research and travel. He will go on research leave this fall and plans to complete his fifth book of poetry.
“Awards like the NEA Fellowship are so important to artists, especially to writers,” Dischell said. “We don’t need materials so much as we need time.”
Dischell has written four acclaimed books of poetry, most recently “Backwards Days.” His poems have appeared in over a hundred publications, including The Atlantic, The New Republic, Pushcart Prize, The Kenyon Review, Slate and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems.
Many critics have noted the dark restlessness of Dischell’s work or, as the Library Journal put it, “a noirish sense of intrigue.” As poet Mark Jarman has pointed out in The Hudson Review, “The way loss—of love, of home, of connections—is approached indirectly gives Dischell’s poems their edge . . . but with an innate sympathy for the other, a desire not to wound.” In Dischell’s poems, observed another reviewer, “all’s as sweet and smooth and romantic as a guillotine.”
Yet Dischell has also been praised for the comedic nature of his work. Poet Carol Muske-Dukes wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Dischell’s “Backwards Days” is “an immensely sane book, yet it is in touch with the absurd: jokey, credulous, a little cockeyed,” while critic Kevin Nance in Booklist says Dischell’s poems offer “heavy doses of whimsy, satire, and a sense of the absurd worthy of Groucho Marx.”
Dischell is also working on a nonfiction book tentatively titled “The Walls of Paris,” which he describes as part travelogue, part family history, and part catalogue of the ancient gates leading into the heart of the city.
