Greenville writer wins NEA fellowship
More #SCartists good news before the weekend
Thursday, the National Endowment for the Arts announced a total of $1.2 million in fellowships to creative writers and translators, supporting both the development of new works of American literature and the translation into English of literary prose, poetry, and drama from writers around the world.
“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support our nation’s writers and translators and their efforts to expand our literary landscape through their artistry, creativity, and dedication,” said Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts also announced the first round of FY 2020 grants for arts projects, which included 53 grants totaling $1,150,000 for literary publishing projects.
Click here for The Hub's coverage and
here for the NEA's announcement
Creative Writing Fellowships
The National Endowment for the Arts will award 36 Creative Writing Fellowships of $25,000 each, for a total of $900,000. Fellowships alternate each year between poetry and prose and this year’s fellowships are to support prose—works of fiction and creative nonfiction, such as memoirs and personal essays. The Arts Endowment received nearly 1,700 eligible applications, which were reviewed anonymously by a panel solely on the artistic excellence of the writing sample submitted
. These fellowships allow recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.
Among them is Greenville writer
Dr. Joni Tevis (right), an assistant professor of English at Furman University. Her bio on the Furman website says she is a creative writer with research interests in the essay, environmental writing, and atomic literature. Her first book of nonfiction,
The Wet Collection, was published by Milkweed Editions.
Since 1967, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded more than 3,500 Creative Writing Fellowships totaling over $55 million. Many recipients have gone on to receive the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction, such as Anthony Doerr, Louise Erdrich, Tyehimba Jess, Jennifer Egan, and Juan Felipe Herrera.
Literature Translation Fellowships
In fiscal year 2020, the National Endowment for the Arts will award 24 Literature Translation Fellowships of $12,500 each, for a total of $300,000. These fellowships will support the English translation of works from 19 countries including Brazil, Egypt, and Japan. Most of these fellowships are to translate works of award-winning and bestselling authors, many of whom have not yet been represented in English. Supported projects include a translation by Bill Johnston of the first two books in the novel cycle
Nights and Days by Polish writer Maria Dąbrowska and a translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson of two poetry collections by Congolese author Alain Mabanckou.
Since 1981, the Arts Endowment has awarded 504 fellowships to 445 translators, with translations representing 70 languages and 86 countries. Past recipients include Natasha Wimmer, whose fellowship supported her translation of Roberto Bolaño’s
2666, and Jennifer Croft, whose fellowship supported her translation of Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s
Flights.
Visit the Arts Endowment’s
Literature Fellowships webpage to read excerpts by and features on past Creative Writing Fellows and Literature Translation Fellows.
About the National Endowment for the Arts
Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is the independent federal agency whose funding and support gives Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the Arts Endowment supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America. Visit arts.gov to learn more.
This time the plaudits came thanks to the essay “If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You,” a tour through history of hazing experiences—including her own—published in The Georgia Review.
The Pushcart Prizes award the best poetry, short fiction and essays published in smaller literary journals and magazines in the United States. Tevis’s essay will appear with other winners in The Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses 2023 edition, available Nov. 15, 2022.
“Joni Tevis writes insightfully about the social dynamics that lead to abusive hazing rituals and the consequences for victims’ lives,” said C.J. Bartunek, managing editor of The Georgia Review. “In the process, she takes readers into the hidden worlds of some fascinating subcultures, from elite college marching bands to the bizarre traditions of 19th-century secret societies to the 1950s space race, in which ambitious participants must determine how far they are willing to go to succeed. ‘If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You’ is an unforgettable essay, which we were proud to publish.”
“If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You” centers around Tevis’s experience as a member of the marching band at Florida State University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree.
“One thing I’m really happy about is the community that writing and publishing this essay has allowed me to build,” Tevis said. “I wrote this from a place of sorrow, of losing the community that marching band had been for me. For me, being hazed in this way was a radically alone-making thing—I didn’t talk about it, not with the others who had been through it, and not with friends or family back home. When I finally started to write about it, after many years, I didn’t realize the loneliness that I still carried with me, like a scar this experience caused me to have.”
Working with Bartunek, Tevis said, helped her “shape the piece into something that wasn’t just for me, but was for other people, other readers. After the piece’s publication, I’ve heard from other band members who’ve reached out to connect with me about this material. I’m so thankful for that. This is what I want my writing to do: to help us feel less alone, to help build communities.
“This essay means a lot to me, not only because it was so hard to write, but because it allowed me the great gift of writing my way into a new community. I’m so honored that it will be reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology, finding its way to new readers,” Tevis said.
Tevis’s first Pushcart-winning essay, “What the Body Knows,” was published in the 2015 edition of the compendium. Her first collection of essays, The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory, was published in 2007. Her second, The World Is On Fire, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2015. Tevis’s writing has also appeared in The Oxford American, Shenandoah, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Bellingham Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Barrelhouse. She earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. She joined Furman’s faculty in 2008.
As the day nears for the 2021 South Carolina Arts Awards, The Hub is focusing on this year's recipients: seven receiving the 
A native of Washington, Flowers was born in 1928. He attended Mount Vernon High School and Furman University on a football scholarship and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art. He went on to the University of Iowa for his master’s of fine arts. After a short stay in the U.S. Air Force he was drafted in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
He taught at Furman University for 30 years, from 1959 to 1989 when he joined the emeritus faculty. Tom was chairman of the art department for most of his tenure at Furman. Prior to that he taught at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas.
Flowers exhibited widely as an artist, winning many awards including Springs Mills best-in-show, Art in Architecture Award from the South Carolina American Institutes of Greenville for a carved/painted constructed mural for the Greenville City Hall. He was selected as one of the 100 Artists/100 Years exhibit at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. He has had many shows in the Midwest, South, and Southeast. Many of his works are in permanent and private collections including the (South Carolina) State Art Collection, Springs Mills, Greenville County Museum of Art, Asheville Art Museum, Columbia Museum of Art, Florence County Museum, Citizens and Southern Bank, South Carolina National Bank, Federal Reserve Bank of Virginia, and Bank of America (née NationsBank). He was one of 12 artists from South Carolina whose works were presented in the South Carolina National Bank exhibit, The Bicentennial, An Interpretive Approach. His work was also included in the Portrait of the South exhibition in Rome, Italy. He served as president of the Greenville Artist Guild and a board member of the Guild of South Carolina Artists.
He was a former member of the board of trustees of the Greenville County Museum of Art, a state representative of the American Craft Council, a member of the Guild of S.C. Artists advisory board, and a Pickens County arts commissioner.
Thomas Earl Flowers passed away Sunday, Dec. 13, 2020, after his nomination was made in the artist category.
Joni Tevis, the Bennette E. Geer Associate Professor of English at Furman University, has been awarded a 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
The NEA selected only 36 Fellows from a pool of nearly 1,700 applicants – just over 2 percent. The individual fellowships are valued at $25,000 and enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel and general career advancement.
Fellows are selected through an anonymous process and are judged on the artistic excellence of the work sample provided.
Tevis earned the honor for her work of prose, “What the Body Knows,” found in the book, The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse, a collection of her writings published in 2015 by Milkweed Editions.
“What the Body Knows” draws from Tevis’ journey with her spouse and a guide up the Canning River in the northeast reaches of Alaska, where, she says in her essay, there’s “no road but the river, and two weeks to reach the edge of the world.” The Canning flows 125 miles through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and spills into Camden Bay, which is fed by the Arctic Ocean.
Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the NEA, said, “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support our nation’s writers, including Joni Tevis, and the artistry, creativity and dedication that go into their work.”
Tevis says she is grateful to Furman for supporting her work and trips into the wild, and she says the fellowship did not come easily. For writers who have met rigorous publishing requirements in prose, the fellowship is offered every other year from the NEA. Tevis has applied seven times since 2007.
“I’m so honored and humbled by this fellowship,” Tevis said. “I ask my students, as I ask myself: ‘What would you write if you knew you could not fail?’ I treasure this ‘yes’ after the six rounds of ‘no,’ but the ‘noes’ were useful too, because they spurred me on. We must never give up.”
Tevis will apply the fellowship funds toward her next sabbatical, where she’ll finish her current book manuscript –“a book of nonfiction about creation, destruction and the music that sees us through,” she said.
A winner of multiple awards, Tevis has been published in Oxford American, the Bellingham Review, Shenandoah, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Orion, a literary journal focused on environmental themes, and where “What the Body Knows” also appeared.
Formerly a park ranger, factory worker and purveyor of cemetery plots, Tevis teaches literature and creative writing at Furman and is the author of another acclaimed book of essays, The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory (2012, Milkweed Editions), her first book of nonfiction.
She came to Furman in 2008 after serving as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She helped create the English department’s new writing track, which offers courses in nonfiction, fiction and poetry writing.
Tevis holds a bachelor’s degree from Florida State University and advanced degrees from the University of Houston.
This summer, Shelby (right) presented her research at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment held at University of California, Davis, and at the International Conference on Romanticism hosted by The University of Manchester, England.
Both conferences are known for discriminating audiences, researchers, and equally scrutinous research review committees.
At the two meetings, Fraser presented “Poesy breaths in all: Ecocritical Explorations of Romanticism’s Omnipoetic Universe.”
Born of Fraser’s interdisciplinary project examining ecoacoustic avian telemetries, the paper explores naturalistic figurations of birdsong by Romantic poet John Clare, who was described by his biographer as “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced.”
The opportunity to present at both conferences was a pleasant surprise for Fraser. “I scarcely dared to hope that either would accept me, and yet here I am with the beautiful opportunity to present at both,” she said.
Mentor Michele Speitz, Furman associate professor of English literature, said that many graduate students and faculty members submit work to these conferences without success. “So for Beth to be selected as the only undergraduate to present at two major professional conferences is truly remarkable,” Speitz said. “She is not only presenting her work in front of an exacting audience, but is speaking as an expert, as someone with something important to share with people in the know.”
Fraser said Furman’s Office of Undergraduate Research and the Furman Humanities Development Fund encouraged and supported her investigations.
An English literature and art history double-major, Fraser specializes in 19th-century British literature and early 20th-century painting with particular interests in Romanticism, ekphrastic poetry, the Simultaneous movement, aesthetic theologies, ecocritical theory, and the intersection of art and literature.
Fraser is especially interested in Romantic-era metaphysics and ecocritical art history. She is co-writing an article with Speitz entitled “Avian Telemetries & the Audible Anthropocene: Romantic Ecoacoustics, Transdisciplinary Ecologies, Sympoetic Worlding.”
Following graduation next spring, Fraser plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Romantic literature or modern art on her way to becoming a professor in the field.
Laura Kennedy, Furman University associate professor of musicology, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to conduct research in Russia during the 2019/2020 academic year.
For her research project, “Ballet in a Waning Empire: Shostakovich, Lopukhov, and the Search for Soviet Dance,” Kennedy will work in music and dance archives in St. Petersburg and Moscow. She will research costumes, set designs, choreographic notes, musical scores, photographs and other materials from early Soviet ballet productions written in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s, a formative period of experimentation in the Russian arts.
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright honor represents a national competition across the humanities, arts, sciences and education. Grantees undergo a rigorous peer-review process, in which proposals are evaluated in both the U.S. and destination countries and are finally selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
“I’m thrilled with the opportunity of this Fulbright and with the chance to pursue new research on Russian ballet. My goal is to author the first book ever written on the ballets of Dmitri Shostakovich: The Golden Age, The Bolt, and The Limpid Stream,” said Kennedy. “These early ballets set the direction of Soviet dance, ensuring ballet’s place as a central expression of Soviet cultural achievement and diplomacy in the 20th century.”
Presented annually, the award recognizes the best article published in peer-reviewed Fontes Artis Musicae, the quarterly membership journal of the IAML.
Announced at the IAML Conference in Krákow, Poland, in July, the award is named for Fédorov (1901-1979), noted music librarian, first editor-in-chief of Fontes Artis Musicae, and Russian music scholar.
An abstract of Sasser’s winning paper may be found at: 
Toverud, of Lenoir, North Carolina, prevailed through several rounds (state, national second round, and semi-finals) before being chosen as one of four to advance to finals, where he bested students from the nation’s most prestigious conservatories and schools of music.
"It’s exciting to win a competition, but winning is second to the pursuit of musical excellence. My drive as a musician comes from a reverence of the art and the intense human expression that music carries," said Toverud.
Last summer, Toverud was a finalist and winner at the National Association of Teachers of Singing Competition in Las Vegas, Nevada.
While at Furman, he studied voice with Associate Professor of Music Grant Knox, who said, “This award is quite an accomplishment, not only for Bergsvein, but for the entire Furman Department of Music.”
Active in many aspects of the music program, Toverud sang Ralph Rackstraw in “H.M.S. Pinafore” and the Witch in “Hansel and Gretel” with Furman Lyric Theatre, directed by Knox. He was a featured soloist in numerous concerts with the Furman Symphony Orchestra and was a member of both the Furman Singers and Furman Chamber Choir.
Toverud was the recipient of the DuPre Rhame Scholarship and the Hartness Scholarship at Furman. Outside of the department, Toverud held the Herring Church Music Internship at First Baptist Church in Greenville.
Toverud will continue his studies in vocal performance this fall at the Eastman School of Music, where he has received a substantial merit award and graduate teaching fellowship.
Jeffrey Makala, Furman University special collections librarian and university archivist at the James B. Duke Library, has co-edited a new book about dogs in literature.
The book, “In Dogs We Trust: An Anthology of American Dog Literature,” is co-edited by Jacob F. Rivers III and published by the University of South Carolina Press. A book signing event is set for Saturday, June 8, 10 a.m.-noon at M. Judson Booksellers in downtown Greenville.
University of South Carolina Press offers this description of “In Dogs We Trust”: