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RELEASED: April 8, 2004
DANVILLE, KY—Lisa Williams, assistant professor of English at Centre College, has received a 2004 award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Williams won a prestigious Rome Prize in literature. The annual award goes to 15 emerging artists working in architecture, landscape, design, historic preservation and conservation, literature, musical composition or visual arts, and 15 scholars in ancient, medieval, renaissance or modern Italian studies.
The award provides a one-year residency at the American Academy in Rome, a center that sustains independent artistic pursuits and humanistic studies. Williams will return to her faculty position at Centre in the fall of 2005.
Williams is one of just two writers to receive the Rome Prize this year. Writers are nominated for the Rome Prize by a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Rome Prize has gone to some of America’s best-known authors, including Anthony Hecht, William Styron, Anne Sexton, A.R. Ammons, Harold Brodkey, Walter Clemons, Richard Wilbur, Ralph Ellison and John Ciardi.
“I couldn’t be happier,” says Williams, who will officially accept the prize May 19 in New York City. “I’d actually been thinking of learning Italian to study some Italian poets that I’ve become very fond of in translation in the last year, Eugenio Montale and Cesare Pavese. This gives me a great opportunity to study the language, in addition to all the other benefits such a fellowship offers.”
During her time in Rome, Williams plans on writing poems and revising others as well as writing essays and reviews. She looks forward to exploring Rome and meeting fellowship recipients from all the disciplines to share ideas and art.
Williams is also looking into the possibility of teaching a course on poetry and art to be held in Rome during Centre’s CentreTerm in January.
A native of Nashville, Tenn., Williams joined the Centre faculty in 2001. She attended Belmont University, received her M.A. in literature from the University of Cincinnati, and earned an M.F.A. in creative writing-poetry at the University of Virginia.
Her book of poetry, The Hammered Dulcimer, was published in 1998. Her poems have been published in Southeast Review, Poetry, New England Review, Raritan, The New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Williams has won an Academy of American Poets prize and a May Swenson Poetry award. She received an Elliston Fellowship in Poetry and the Elliston Prize from the University of Cincinnati and a Henry Hoynes Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Virginia.
For more on the Rome Prize, visit http://www.aarome.org/.
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