First-year student Anna K. Faison of Aiken, S.C., has been awarded a Thomas Wolfe Scholarship, a full, four-year merit scholarship in creative writing to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
First-year student Anna K. Faison of Aiken, S.C., has been awarded a Thomas Wolfe Scholarship, a full, four-year merit scholarship in creative writing to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the scholarship program, established in 2001 with a gift to UNC from alumnus Frank Borden Hanes Sr. of Winston-Salem. It honors Carolina alumnus Thomas Wolfe, best known for his 1929 novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.”
Faison attended South Aiken High School and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. She has been published in the Kenyon Review (the literary journal of Kenyon College in Ohio), the New Mexico Poetry Review, the Hollins University (Virginia) student literary magazine and Greenville Magazine. Her prizes include a first place for poetry from the Kenyon Review and first place and honorable mentions for poetry from Hollins.
“I don’t write because I want to say something to other people,” Faison wrote in her
scholarship application. “I write because I have something to say to myself and turn it over until it makes some semblance of sense, until it teaches me something about my own life or the world around me.”
Faison counts Naomi Shihab Nye, Amy Hempel and Susan Orlean among her favorite writers. She has done mission work in Haiti, tutored English-As-A-Second-Language students and been an arts mentor to kids in her community.
“Anna Faison emerged from among our outstanding applicants as not only a gifted poet, but demonstrating remarkable strengths as a prose writer as well,” said Marianne Gingher, professor of English and comparative literature and co-director of the scholarship program. “Our committee was impressed by her poise, her friendliness, her obvious devotion to writing and reading, her range of subject matter, her rich and provocative use of language and her mature sensibility, both on the page and in person.”
Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/creative/scholarships/tws
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589