JACKSON, Tenn. — April 14, 2015 — Union University English professor Bobby Rogers was recently selected to receive the 2015 Witter Bynner Fellowship in the amount of $10,000.
Rogers was chosen to receive the award by Charles Wright, 20th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. The fellowship, funded by the Witter Bynner Foundation, exists solely to support poetry writing.
As a recipient of the fellowship, Rogers has two primary responsibilities – to coordinate a poetry reading in his home state and to take part in poetry readings and recordings at the Library of Congress.
For Rogers, who studied under Wright in college, the award is especially meaningful.
“I’ve admired Charles Wright since I was first figuring out what a poem could be,” Rogers said. “When I arrived at the University of Virginia to study with him, I was 21 years old and needing to learn everything. What Charles showed me was how a serious mind goes about making art.”
Remarking on his choice of poets, Wright said, “[Rogers] is a very narrative poet, and tells stories about memory and pieces of memory – how they fit together or don’t always fit, and what that means for the language’s inability to say what we want it to say.”
The timing of the award is also significant. Rogers received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the 2015-2016 year.
“The additional funds from the Witter Bynner Fellowship make it a little more justifiable to take a semester off from teaching and sit down to make some new poems,” Rogers said.
Rogers is the author of “Paper Anniversary,” winner of the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. He is also the recipient of the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry. His poems have been published in several literary journals including The Southern Review, Georgia Review and Shenandoah. He has been teaching at Union since 1989.
Rogers, along with fellow award-winner Emily Fragos of New York University, were presented by the Poet Laureate at a special poetry reading event in Washington, D. C., in March.