Congratulations to Janet Ford, a poet and former school teacher from Taylorsville, North Carolina, who has been awarded the 2021 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship at Weymouth.
Janet Ford lives in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains in western North Carolina, where she taught English in public schools until 2014. A Laureate Finalist in the Pinesong Awards of 2020 and 2021, she was the recipient of the 2017 Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review. Her poems have received prizes from Kakalak, The New Southerner, and the Charlotte Writers’ Club, and she participated in Poetry to Sustain Us 2020. The North Carolina Literary Review Online and The Blue Heron Review are among publications that have included her work. She will be featured in Poetry in Plain Sight in February 2022.
The fellowship winner receives a week-long writing residency at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines and a $500 stipend. Each year the merit-based fellowship is awarded to one North or South Carolina poet. The submission period opens May 1 and closes July 31. Applicants submit a manuscript of five pages of poetry and all submissions are read “blind.”
The judges—Robert Hill Long, Crystal Simone Smith, and Charles Fort—also selected Lisa Hase-Jackson as Finalist. Jackson’s debut collection of poetry, Flint and Fire, was selected by Jericho Brown for the 2019 Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series. She holds an MFA in poetry from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC, and a MA in English from Kansas State University. A full-time Writing Coach and Editor-in-Chief of South 85 Journal, Lisa lives in Charleston, SC with her husband, two cats, and seven chickens.
Honorable mentions were awarded to Annie Woodford and Lauren Bullock.
Please Note: No fellowship was awarded in 2020 due to the pandemic.