This year’s winner of the President’s Excellence Award in Creative Activity is Southeastern’s Writer in Residence and Instructor of English Alison Pelegrin. A resident of Covington, she has been a member of the Southeastern faculty for 20 years.
Throughout her career at Southeastern, Pelegrin’s artistic accomplishments have been outstanding. Highlights of her creative achievements include her appointment as 2023-2025 Louisiana Poet Laureate, recognition and support of her creative work in the form of an ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, and winning a $20,000 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“As Writer-in-Residence, I bring positive attention to Southeastern with ongoing contributions to the discussion of creative writing and poetry, and this reach has magnified since my appointment as Louisiana Poet Laureate,” Pelegrin said.
She has earned widespread critical acclaim, appeared before a wide array of national and local audiences, and received numerous awards and honors, including Southeastern’s President’s Award for Artistic Excellence in 2003. Pelegrin has also been awarded multiple artist mini-grants from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship of $5,000.
Pelegrin has published five poetry collections, has won book prizes, post-publication prizes, and has had her work featured by the Poetry Society of America and PBS. Individually her poems are consistently published in top literary journals, such as Poetry, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, to name a few.
Professionally, Pelegrin’s role is to raise the profile of the Department of English on campus and to meet potential writers where they are with encouragement and enthusiasm. Creatively, she said her duty is to write. As a result, she finds herself deep into another project tentatively titled Multitudes.
“In these poems I approach the Anthropocene through the lens of Louisiana’s landscape and in conversation with poems and voices from blank century Japan to the present day. The poems strike a chord of mournfulness and humor,” she said. “As is typical of my work, I experiment with forms – in this new work, that has meant ballades, sestinas, trenta-sei, haibun, and variations on the sonnet.”
History and Political Science Department Head Bill Robison said Pelegrin is a truly gifted poet, especially since she “turned her misfortunes into her best work yet.”
“Many writers have tackled the hurricanes and flood that have ravaged Louisiana since 2005, but Alison’s vantage point and voice are unique, as is her take on south Louisiana in general,” he said. “The gift of producing poetry that is genuine, memorable, rooted, and yet timeless art is rare, and poets who possess that gift to the degree that Alison does are rarer still.”
