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Dr. Sarah Kennedy
Professor Grant-ed Travel Time By Major Arts Awards
One book. Two grants. One month. Mary Baldwin College Associate Professor of English Dr. Sarah Kennedy was recently selected for a $20,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a $5,000 grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, both awarded within a few weeks of publishing her fourth collection of poems, Consider the Lilies.
"It is perfect timing," Dr. Kennedy said. "The grants will be valuable to me as I work on a new project writing historical poems." Dr. Kennedy was selected for the national award as one of only 45 recipients from a pool of 1,600 poets.
Dr. Kennedy's current project, historical poems about witches, mystics and saints, has already taken her abroad to research medieval towns and landmarks. She will use the grant money to rent a house in Ireland over summer break and she also plans to travel more extensively in Europe, specifically in Wales and England.
"To compose accurate historical poems, it is vital to be in the places where events took place," said Dr. Kennedy, offering as an example a poem she wrote about 14th-century British mystic Julian of Norwich. "I needed to describe the town where she confined herself to a cell and to see things such as what side of the church her room was on. I needed to know if she would have been able to see a certain castle and cathedral from her window to include them as poignant details in my piece."
"There is something intangible about being in a sacred space, which is what I consider many of the places where these figures lived and died," Dr. Kennedy said. "It fires my imagination in a way that researching long-distance does not." Dr. Kennedy is also the co-editor of an anthology of Virginia poets. Her poetry books have won the Cleveland State University Press and Elixir Press awards, and her poems have earned awards from The Florida Review and the The Nebraska Review. Dr. Kennedy earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Butler University in Indianapolis and she holds a doctorate from Purdue University.
Dr. Kennedy has applied her "conversational" style of teaching to courses ranging from entry-level freshman introductions to in-depth graduate studies from the time when she started at MBC in 2000. "The best classes I have end up as conversations where I learn as much from the students as they do from me," she said.
"There was a moment when I realized that no other college would have a Dr. Kennedy," said Kate Melson '05. "She's unbelievably knowledgeable and able to communicate this knowledge in the best way possible: low key as if class were just a dinner conversation about something fabulous. She has gone above and beyond the call of a professor and advisor in aiding me in academics and life so I could grow as a scholar and as a person."
One of Dr. Kennedy's recent historical poems about a Welsh farmer can be read at Poetry Daily, an online poetry magazine.