Â鶹ÊÓƵ English Instructor, Writer-in-Residence and Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin has received $50,000 as a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellow. The award is one of 22 distributed across the country by the Academy of American Poets, a leading financial supporter of poets in the United States.
Through her Lifelines Prison Poetry Project, Pelegrin will facilitate poetry workshops in 10 prisons and jails and five community centers. She will create a project website featuring four Lifelines podcasts, each of which will introduce a poetry prompt. Selected excerpts inspired by each prompt will be printed on posters to be distributed statewide. As a culminating event, Pelegrin will present the project at the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
A resident of Covington, Pelegrin is the author of several collections, including Our Lady of Bewilderment (LSU Press, 2022), which won the Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Louisiana Board of Regents. Pelegrin has taught at Â鶹ÊÓƵ for more than twenty years.
Photo credit: Brian Pavlich
