Past Award Winners

Rasha Abdulhadi is community organizer and writer. They are working on a project which traces an arc from the death of their Palestinian father just before the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the passing of his mother, their Sitti, the weekend after the 2016 US election.

doris davenport (pronouns: person / per) is a visionary 73 year old retired college professor, LGBTQ+ independent scholar, literary & performance poet; born in Gainesville, GA and raised in Cornelia, GA, in traditional Cherokee Homelands. doris has published 12 books of poetry, most recently, dancing in time: poetry, monologues, stories, lies (2019). She continually works towards a more egalitarian, inclusive reality, towards ending all forms of oppression.

Justin Rudder is a Digital Asset Archivist at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, as well as the founder and director of the Digital Grassroots heritage project. He has written for Alabama Heritage, the Alabama Review, and the Encyclopedia of Alabama on slavery and civil rights in Alabama, Black historiography, and geography and place-naming in Black community life.

Dr. Sarah Higinbotham co-founded and co-directs Common Good Atlanta, an initiative that provides accredited college courses in men’s and women’s prisons throughout Georgia. Since its founding in 2008, Common Good Atlanta works in 4 Georgia prisons, 4 days a week, and has a waiting list for students and volunteers. Dr. Higinbotham has worked with some of her students at Emory to extend Shakespeare studies to combat veterans through “The Feast of Crispian.” She has also spoken to policymakers, judges, and media on the ways that incarceration affects not just those who are incarcerated but also their families and children.

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, and many other journals and anthologies. She is co-founder and was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness for 10 years. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Browning is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and three issues of POETRYmagazine. From 2006 to 2019 Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize.

Browning is a columnist for the Other Words op ed service and her essays have appeared in newspapers around the country, in Common Dreams, Utne Reader, Sojourners, The Writer’s Notebook, VIDA Review, and other venues. She previously worked supporting socially engaged women artists with WomenArts and developing creative writing workshops with low-income women and youth with Amherst Writers & Artists. She has been a community organizer in Boston public housing and a grassroots political organizer on a host of social and political issues.

Dana De Greff is a creative writing instructor at the University of Miami and a widely-published and award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and book reviews. She has worked as a writing teacher in various capacities for eight years for both children and adults. She is the executive director for the administration of a $45,000 grant from the Knight Foundation that has created and operates PageSlayers Summer Camp, a series of three consecutive two-week sessions for rising fourth and fifth graders. She also served as the community outreach and public relations coordinator for the VONA Voices Writers’ Conference in Miami in 2016.

Dyan Neary has many years of experience as a volunteer and as a professional teaching literacy and creative writing in prison systems, low-income communities, and in the classroom. She served as a volunteer with Books Through Bars, a New York-based organization that sent books to prisoners for free. While living in Ecuador, she visited a women's prison twice a week, teaching elementary school children to read in one of only two countries where children are permitted to live in the cells with their incarcerated mothers.  She went on to film a documentary based on her experiences there. Neary also co-founded Picture This, a volunteer-run creative writing and photography workshop in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, NY, where she taught classes for at-risk middle school children. She facilitated creative-writing workshops at Gadsden Correctional Facility, a women's prison in Quincy, FL. “I am committed to helping my students succeed as writers,” Neary said.

Mr. Halloran is a combat veteran, and his debut collection, Shortly Thereafter, is a memoir-in-verse documenting his experiences on the front lines of Afghanistan and the impact they had on him when returning to civilian life. His follow-up collection, Icarian Flux, explores Halloran's post-military life with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He has conducted numerous workshops for other veterans and their families, teaching writing as a coping mechanism for those suffering from PTSD. He has consulted with the National Center for PTSD and several VA hospitals around the country, working with care teams and leadership to encourage the incorporation of creative arts and narrative medicine into treatment plans for the disorder.

A teaching specialist and the Director of the Community Practice Clinic at the University of Minnesota, Professor Cook strives to integrate her writing, teaching, and social activism while bringing literature and creativity to her community work and addressing issues of social justice in her artistic endeavors. She has conducted numerous workshops for writers and public interest practitioners in St. Louis, Michigan State University, University of Wales College in South Wales, City University in London, and also in Puerto Rico.

Mr. Kirkland is the curator of history at the History Museum of Mobile. His primary focus of historical research is twentieth-century Mobile politics and civil rights. His work on Mobile has received research and writing awards from the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the Gulf South Historical Association, and the Alabama Historical Association.

Ms. Reed is an accomplished writer, producer (an Emmy Award nominee), author of essays, short stories, and All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (University of Alabama Press, 2006).

Ms. Best is a performance poet who has taught writing workshops for women in Atlanta through an outreach program called The City of Refuge.

Ms. Stevens is the founder, director, and a teaching poet with the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project at Auburn University.  The Project teaches creative writing, promotes literacy, and distributes reading materials in Alabama prisons.

“In its most pure form, my work in the prisons is based on the fundamental belief that poetry is life-changing and that opportunities to learn and create should be available for everyone,” wrote Stevens in her application essay.

Ms. Stevens earned a B in English from Auburn University in 1994, and she earned an MA in women’s history and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in New York.  She has worked as a firefighter with the Farmville Volunteer Fire Department and a Council Member in the Town of Waverly.  She also serves as an Advisory Board Member for the Emerging Arts Leaders of Alabama.

Mr. Dickson teaches creative writing at the Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, Alabama.  He was named Secondary Teacher of the Year by the Alabama PTA for the 2009-2010 school year.  He earned a BA in English from Auburn University at Montgomery in 1996, and he completed a Master of Liberal Arts degree from AUM in 2008.

“My own writing has kept me engaged deeply in Southern culture, particularly in Alabama’s culture, and I have made sure to carry that engagement into my teaching,” wrote Dickson in his application essay.

Clair Eisele is a recent graduate of Piedmont University’s art program. She hails from San Diego, California, and has lived in Georgia for the past five years. She served seven and a half years in the United States Air Force and holds an associate degree in Sustainable Urban Agriculture from San Diego City College.

Tom Hansell is a filmmaker, educator, and author who explores relationships between energy, community, and nature. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Independent Television Service, The Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Southern Humanities Media Fund and his films have screened at national and international festivals, including the Museum of Modern Art. Hansell plans to use his residency at the Lillian Smith Center to focus on the Ancient New project, a series of short films, art installations, and public events that will reveal invisible ties between mountain headwaters communities and urban communities downstream. Working across geographic, racial, and political boundaries, these events will bring people together to celebrate the river and to ensure equal access to fresh water.

Teena Wilder is the recipient of the 2020 McClure-Scanlin Visual Artist Residency award. Wilder has been Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Residence and received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. She has had numerous exhibitions in South Carolina and Wisconsin, and her work has appeared in publications such as Jet Magazine. Wilder’s work, as she puts it, “seeks to disrupt and redirect space, time, and form through video, sculpture, performance, and critique.” She focuses on the ways that “the black body utilizes being an inconsequential spectacle as a way to navigate restricting systems and invisibility.”

The winner of the 2018 McClure-Scanlin Visual Arts Residency Award is Ira Merritt. A multimedia artist from The Bronx, Merritt’s creative roots are in photography and printmaking. He is a retired teacher of photography for 33 years, the last 24 of which were at the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan. He built up the school's internship program to be one of the most successful in New York City. He has been a recipient of four individual artist awards in photography from the Bronx Council on the Arts and has received grants for photography projects including documenting the residents of the Amalgamated Cooperative (the oldest housing co-op in the nation) during their 85th anniversary year. “The struggle between individual needs and wants and what is good for society has been waged since the beginning of human existence,” Merritt says. “Every individual first investigates and then debates internally before a decision is made; weighted down by a lifetime of experiences.”