Student awarded NEA Literature Fellowship

Nicole Beer is in good company in the English department; she's one of four people — two faculty and one other student — who have won National Endowment for the Arts grants.

If the number of awards won could definitively predict success in a field, Nicky Beer would be a sure bet. A doctoral student in the English department, Beer has garnered an impressive set of honors in the past year.

Beer's poem "Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions" was selected to appear in 2007 Best American Poetry. A group of her poems was selected for a reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York and publication in The Nation in the 2006 Discovery/The Nation contest. This national competition, sponsored by The Nation magazine, is designed to attract large audiences to poets who have not yet published a book of poetry.

Beer also won second place in the national Astrobiology and the Sacred Poetry Contest, administered through the University of Arizona, with her poem "The Collector's Song."

Perhaps the most prestigious of Beer's awards is the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship that includes a $20,000 prize. The cash prize affords writers the opportunity to more easily devote time to their craft.

"All the awards are just kind of overwhelming and staggering to hear about, but getting the NEA phone call was the most dramatic," Beer says. "I actually got a phone call from Dana Gioia, the NEA chairman. I got a message from him right before I went to bed that he was going to call me back the next morning."

Beer had to be up early the next morning to take her comprehensive exams, so that amazing phone message was not exactly balm for slightly jangled nerves. Her excitement was palpable, and she could hardly sleep at a time when she really needed to be rested; she talked to Gioia an hour before her exams and learned that she had, indeed, won an NEA fellowship for poetry.

"I had to go on campus and work for three hours without talking to anybody to share my news," she remembers.

Beer says that visiting zoos, aquariums and museums helps her writing, and that's one of the things that the NEA award has opened up to her. She was recently in Atlanta where she set aside a whole day to visit the aquarium there. "Freedom to visit the places that inspire me is just incredible," she says.

Beer's primary interest is poetry, and writing creative non-fiction is a secondary interest. After completing her degree, she will move to Kentucky, where her husband, also a poet, teaches at Murray State University. Beer intends to finish her second book, enter the academic job market, and "take it from there."

Links:

Nicky Beer
Department of English
Creative Writing Program

Discovery/The Nation '06 Prizewinners
Astrobiology and the Sacred Poetry Contest
Best American Poetry
Unterberg Poetry Center