FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Of the 42 creative writing fellowships of $25,000 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded in 2009 to poets across the United States, four were given to alumni of the University of Arkansas Creative Writing Program: Chelsea Rathburn, Bill Notter, Thom Satterlee and Charles Rafferty.

Chelsea Rathburn, who attended college at Florida State University, holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Arkansas. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Shifting Line, won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award and was published by the University of Evansville Press. She is also the author of a chapbook, Unused Lines, from Aralia Press. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Cincinnati Review and other journals. Other honors include a 2001 Tennessee Williams Scholarship and 2006 Father William Ralston Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. 

Bill Notter, a 2002 graduate, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award for his collection Holding Everything Down, which will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in September. He has received fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council and Sierra Arts Foundation, and was awarded the Walton Fellowship twice from the University of Arkansas program in creative writing. His chapbook, More Space Than Anyone Can Stand, was published as the 2001 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize winner from Texas Review Press.

Writer and translator Thom Satterlee teaches at Taylor University in Indiana. He is the translator of The Hangman's Lament: Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt and the author of a collection of poems, Burning Wyclif. He is the winner of the Translation Prize from the American-Scandanavian Foundation and a research grant from the Vogelstein Foundation. Burning Wyclif was a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and included as one of 25 Notable Books in a list compiled by the American Library Association. He graduated in 1998 with an M.F.A. in literary translation.

Charles Rafferty, a 1990 M.F.A. graduate, is a full-time technical editor and professor at Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut. He also mentors students in the master of fine arts program at Western Connecticut State University. He is the winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, the River Styx International Poetry Contest and the Arkansas Poetry Award for his book The Man on the Tower. He recently received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

He is currently working on two collections of poems. One, American Catena, is a set of poems for each state in the union and Washington, D.C. Another untitled group is a collection of fables and monologues.

“My time at Arkansas was fantastic,” said Rafferty. “It gave me the one thing that turned out to be essential — time to sit around and write, and to read all sorts of writers I might never encounter had I landed someplace else. Jim Whitehead was a huge force, of course. I came to Arkansas despising formal poetry, and I left wanting to write in nothing but form.”

Davis McCombs, director of the creative writing program in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, said, “Since practically every poet in the country applies for an NEA grant, I think it’s pretty extraordinary that four of our alumni would win in the same year. We’re really pleased — and proud.”

The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the National Endowment for the Arts is the nation's largest annual funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities and military bases.

To read poems by the winners, go to http://fulbright.uark.edu/headlines/poems.html