Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing Mylène Dressler and Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Jennie Malboeuf have each been awarded a 2019-20 Artists Fellowship from the N.C. Arts Council.
They are two of just 18 artists recognized across North Carolina in the literary categories of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, and playwriting and in the musical categories of composition and songwriting.
They will each receive $10,000 to fund the production of new work throughout 2019-2020. In addition to the generous funding, they will also hold readings with other fellows around the state to celebrate this year's winners.
Mylène is a critically acclaimed author of novels, short stories, and essays. She says her work is heavily influenced by personal and cultural history, and her most recent novels, including The Last To See Me and the forthcoming I See You So Close, reinvent the genre of the ghost story, exploring the idea of haunting as both history and metaphor.
“My drive is to write stories that move the heart, excite the senses, and ask the reader to tremble with feeling, with the very action of turning the page,” she says.
Jennie has received recognition for her poetry, which focuses on how issues of authority, control, and violence intersect with gender, sex, and memory. Her first collection, God had a body, was awarded the 2019 Blue Light Books prize from the Indiana Review and Indiana UP.
“Ultimately, the objective of my writing is to explore the relationships between the body (animal) and the mind (God),” Jennie says of her work.
The N.C. Arts Council awarded recipients based on selections made by a panel comprised of artists and art professionals with discipline-specific expertise and experience. Their goal is to build on our state’s long-standing love of the arts and to support diverse and innovative artists living and working in North Carolina.