ALLENDALE, Mich. - A Grand Valley State University assistant professor of creative writing, Nicole Walker, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant of $20,000.
Walker, the only Michigan recipient, is one of 50 poets to receive a Literature Fellowship for Creative Writing in Poetry out of more than 1,000 who applied. The NEA calls the grants its "most direct investment in American creativity."
The award encourages the production of new work by affording writers the time and means to write.
"The grant will allow me to focus entirely on my writing for an extended period of time," said Walker, who is in her first year of teaching at Grand Valley. "I plan to write a book of poems about illness, hospitals, the way we think of interior and exterior and also how our personal health reflects that of the planet's.
Her interest in these ideas stems in part from experiences last winter when her young daughter was hospitalized for eight days. "Events at the hospital seemed so foreign to anything happening outside the hospital," said Walker. "Yet, at the same time I felt, as in much of post-modern literature, that there was no escape from language, and that whatever 'escape' we planned to make from the hospital would be merely another aspect of that same fear, scrutiny, and pressure we felt within the hospital."
Walker describes her writing as tackling serious topics in an irreverent way that is littered with attitude and has a humorous side. She was a voracious reader who tackled books such as Roots and 1984 at a very young age. "I was impressed with the characters' ability to affect change," said Walker. "I wanted access to that power."
Before coming to Grand Valley, Walker earned a B.A. from Reed College, and a M.F.A. and doctorate from the University of Utah. She has published poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction in many journals, including Ploughshares, Bellingham Review, Iowa Review, Fence, New American Writing and Black Warrior Review. She has work forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre and Nimrod.
According to the NEA, since 1990, well over half the recipients of the National Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes in fiction and poetry had received NEA Creative Writing Fellowships.
