Two English Faculty Receive 2006 Pennsylvania Arts Fellowships
George Looney, associate professor of English and creative writing and chair of the creative writing program, and Sean Thomas Dougherty, lecturer in English, each have received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA) 2006 Individual Creative Artists Fellowship. Looney received a $10,000 award and Dougherty received $5,000, both in the literature-poetry category.
Looney and Dougherty are English/creative writing faculty at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, and the only Erie County honorees among more than 60 recipients statewide. The PCA granted 13 $10,000 fellowships and 52 $5,000 awards for 2006.
“These prestigious fellowships benefit not only Professors Looney and Dougherty, but also our students at Penn State Behrend,” said Richard Aquila, director, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. “The Arts Fellowships will enable these two talented writers to complete creative projects that will enhance their national reputations. Ultimately, our students will benefit through the outstanding educational experience they receive from these two nationally known professors at Penn State Behrend.”
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Looney has three books to his credit, two of which have received national prizes, including his most recent, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, plus a Greatest Hits 1990-2000 chapbook, published by Pudding House Press in 2001. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Larry Levis Editors’ Award in Poetry from The Missouri Review. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and two grants from the Ohio Arts Council. Looney served as editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review for eight years and, currently, is editor-in-chief of Lake Effect. He has an M.F.A. in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. |
| As a nationally renowned performance poet, Dougherty has rocked stages across North America and Europe at the Lollapalooza Music Festival and the Bardroom Series in Budapest, Hungary, among others. He has earned numerous awards and is the author of eight books, including the book of poems Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, (Mammoth Books 2004) which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Broken Hallelujahs from Pulitzer Prize-winning press BOA Editions of Rochester, N.Y. Dougherty is also the editor of Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Guernica Editions 2005) and Along the Lake: Contemporary Writing from Erie, PA (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press 2005). |
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The goal of these fellowships, which are awarded annually in selected categories, is to encourage and enable outstanding Pennsylvania artists of all backgrounds to perform their work and display it to the public. The PCA is a state agency whose mission is to foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in Pennsylvania, and to broaden the availability and appreciation of those arts throughout the state.
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Behrend is home to one associate and eight baccalaureate degree programs, a pre-law curriculum, a fifth-year teaching certification, seven minors and a study abroad program in collaboration with University College in Northampton, England.