Master's student Alison C. Rollins is one of five recipients of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Awarded by the Poetry Foundation, the fellowship is one of the largest awards offered to young poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one in the United States. The $25,800 prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry.
"The fellowship [is] a validation of my work as an artist, as a poet, as a creative person. Because I'm in school for library and information science and because I work full time as a librarian, this fellowship allows me . . . a certain amount of notoriety in terms of my creative work and poetry outside of my academic studies [and] formal career. I'm really excited also to be open to a new network of other poets," Rollins said.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, River Styx, Vinyl, and elsewhere. In addition to the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, she won second prize in the 2016 James H. Nash Poetry Contest and is a Cave Canem Foundation 2016 Retreat Fellow. Rollins is a librarian at Nerinx Hall High School in Webster Groves, Missouri.