Two UNC Greensboro faculty members and one alumna have received 2019 North Carolina Arts Council fellowships. Eighteen artists across North Carolina received awards in the literary categories of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting and playwriting and in the musical categories of composition and songwriting. Recipients were selected by panels comprised of artists and arts professionals with discipline-specific expertise and experience.
Emilia Phillips is an assistant professor in UNCG’s MFA in Creative Writing program, a poet, and a nonfiction writer.
She is the author of three collections of poetry, including “Empty Clip” and “Groundspeed” from the University of Akron Press, and three chapbooks, including “Hemlock” from Diode Editions and “Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike,” from Bull City Press. In 2019, she received a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Pathetic Fallacy,” and her lyric nonfiction piece, “Excisions,” was awarded a 2015 Storyquarterly Nonfiction Prize.
Phillips will use the grant to fund experiential research and residencies toward the completion of a lyric essay collection. Her two current nonfiction projects, “Wound Revisions: Lyric Memoirs” and “Rewilding: On Queerness, Family, and Body,” examine reconstructive surgery, gun violence, queer families, and troublesome namesakes.
“My writing, both poetry, and nonfiction is concerned with the ways in which our bodies embody violence,” says Emilia Phillips, “whether it’s physical and externalized (as is the case with bruises and scars) or emotional and internalized (homophobia, misogyny, etc.).”
