2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship Winner
Rhett Iseman Trull of Greensboro, NC has been awarded the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship at Weymouth Center for the Arts. The Runner-Up is Khalisa Rae of Durham, NC. R.K. Fauth of Asheville, NC, Anne Myles of Greensboro, NC, and Celisa Steele of Carrboro, NC all received Honorable Mention. Congratulations and thanks to all who applied.
2022 Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship Winner
After careful consideration and evaluation of the 57 collections of poems submitted to the 2022 Susan Laughter Meyers/Weymouth Poetry Residency Contest, the judges (Gideon Young, Pat Rivière-Seel, and Fred Joiner) selected Yvette Murray of Charleston, SC as the 2022 winner. Runner-up was Susan Finch Stevens of Isle of Palms, SC. Honorable Mention was awarded to Chris Abbate of Apex, NC and Kimberly Driggers of Asheville, NC.
Yvette R. Murray received her B.A. in English from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has been published in Emrys Journal, The Petigru Review, Catfish Stew, A Gathering Together, Kakalak and others. She is a 2021 Best New Poet selection, a Watering Hole Fellow, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. She is a board member of the South Carolina Writer’s Association and the Poetry Society of South Carolina and a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. Ms. Murray lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Find her on Twitter @MissYvettewrites.
2021 Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship Winner
Janet Ford, a poet and former school teacher from Taylorsville, North Carolina, was
awarded the 2021 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship at Weymouth. She 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 judges—Robert Hill Long, Crystal Simone Smith, and Charles Fort—also selected Lisa Hase-Jackson as Finalist. Honorable mentions were awarded to Annie Woodford and Lauren Bullock.
Please Note: No fellowship was awarded in 2020 due to the pandemic.
2019 Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship Winner
The winner of the 2019 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship at Weymouth is Benjamin Cutler.
Cutler’s poetry has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Cumberland River Review, Pembroke Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, Longleaf Review, and The Lascaux Review, among many others. He won the North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS) 2019 Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Contest and the NCPS 2019 Poetry of Witness Contest. Benjamin is also a husband, a father of four, and an English and creative writing teacher at Swain County High School in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina where he currently serves as the North Carolina Writers’ Network-West Swain County representative. His debut collection, The Geese Who Might be Gods, is available from Main Street Rag Press.
The judges also named Debra Kaufman as the finalist and awarded honorable mentions to Kendra Juskus, Jennifer Madriaga and Celisa Steele.
2018 Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship Winner
The winner of the 2018 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship at Weymouth is Len Lawson.
Len Lawson is the author of the debut collection Chime (Get Fresh, 2019), the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line, 2017), and co-editor of Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race (Muddy Ford, 2017). He is a Ph.D. student in English Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Len was also named among “Ten South Carolina Poets to Watch” by Richland County Library. He received a Callaloo fellowship and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. His poems have appeared in literary journals. He currently teaches English at the University of South Carolina Sumter.
Two other submissions were awarded Honorable Mention: Jeanne Julian and Michael Gaspeny.