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Jane Springer
Jane Springer

Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Jane Springer has been awarded a prestigious  MacDowell Fellowship for a residency at the Colony in Peterborough, N.H. , from Sept. 19 – Oct.  17.  The MacDowell Colony is the nation’s leading artist colony; it nurtures the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination.

The Colony receives 2,500 applications a year for its 250 Fellowships.  Colony Fellows join a community of artists working in a variety of disciplines and at different stages of their careers, offering a unique opportunity for artists to share new ideas, be inspired by one another’s work during informal presentations of works-in-progress, and frequently collaborate across disciplines. 

Springer, who teaches poetry, joined the Hamilton faculty in 2008.  Her first book, Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007), won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Springer's other awards include an AWP Intro Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry in 2009, and a Whiting Writers Award for poetry in 2010.

She was selected as the 2011 winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award for her collection of poetry, Murder Ballad, which also in 2011 was awarded a Pushcart Prize.  The poem was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses.  The series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.

Springer received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 2008. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such publications as Fugue, The Oxford American and The Southern Review.

The MacDowell Colony was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife Marian MacDowell as the first artist colony in the United States. The mission of The MacDowell Colony is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination.

At its founding, the Colony was an experiment with no precedent. It stands now having provided crucial time and space to more than 6,000 artists, including such notable names as Leonard Bernstein, Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Spalding Gray, and more recently Alice Walker, Alice Sebold, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Suzan-Lori Parks and Meredith Monk, among others.

According to its website, “The sole criterion for acceptance to The MacDowell Colony is artistic excellence. MacDowell defines excellence in a pluralistic and inclusive way, encouraging applications from artists representing the widest possible range of perspectives and demographics.

“MacDowell is committed to selecting artists who are at the forefront of the evolution of their fields, with the potential to produce groundbreaking work,”  the website notes.

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