Poet, Southeastern instructor awarded ATLAS grant
Wednesday, May 22, 2019 
by: Tonya Lowentritt
POET, SOUTHEASTERN INSTRUCTOR RECEIVES GRANT – Southeastern Louisiana University English Instructor and nationally- recognized poet Alison Pelegrin has received a $34,000 Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars grant to fund the completion of her poetry manuscript “Feast Days.” This will be Pelegrin’s fifth poetry collection.
HAMMOND – Southeastern Louisiana University English Instructor and nationally-
recognized poet Alison Pelegrin has received a $34,000 Awards to Louisiana Artists
and Scholars grant to fund the completion of her fifth poetry collection “Feast Days.”
A sub-program of the Louisiana Board of Regents Support Fund’s Research and Development
Program, ATLAS is designed to provide support for major scholarly and artistic productions
with potential to have a broad impact on regional and/or national levels.
Poems from Pelegrin’s in-progress manuscript have appeared in top-tier journals,
such as “Image: Art, Faith, Mystery,” “The Southern Review,” “Tin House,” and “The
Cincinnati Review.”
“The Louisiana Board of Regents has granted me the triple crown - validation of my
work, substantive financial support, and the precious resource of uninterrupted time
to probe the issues I am writing and thinking about,” she said. “Reviewers have often
noted the importance of Louisiana in my work, and for my beloved state to reward me
in this way is a great honor. I am so grateful. I still can’t believe it is real.”
Pelegrin said “Feast Days” celebrates Louisiana and its cycle of destruction
and rebirth on spiritual, political, racial, and environmental spectrums. Her work,
she said, comes from a world of floods, of cars washed away, of fish swimming in streets
and shoes bobbing in closets.
“I grew up in the shadow of New Orleans, on the West Bank of the Mississippi
River, meaning that mansions and oak trees and seersucker society were just out of
reach thanks to the barriers of water and wealth,” she said. “The tension of an outsider’s
existence made my work spiritually rich, alive with the voice of lived experience.
Poetry has never been more essential in a region that struggles to survive ecological
and social catastrophes so often caricatured by outsiders with their drop-in scorn
dressed up to look like concern.”
Pelegrin hopes to attend a two- to four-week residency at a writer’s colony and
has plans to travel to more regional destinations, including Whitney Plantation, the
Civil Rights Museum in Montgomery, Ala., and the sites where Confederate statues once
stood.
Pelegrin is also the author of “Waterlines,” “Hurricane Party,” and “Big Muddy
River of Stars.” In 2007, she was awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts.
