The National Endowment for the Arts has announced that Nora’s Playhouse’s board member and Co-Literary Curator Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble is one of 35 writers who will receive an FY 2021 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. This year’s fellowships are in poetry and enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Fellows are selected through a highly-competitive, anonymous process and are judged on the basis of artistic excellence of the work sample they provided. Trimble was selected from 1,601 eligible applicants. The full list of FY 2021 Creative Writing Fellows is available here.
Trimble is a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2017 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in various journals including The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore and in anthologies which include The Night’s Magician: Poems About the Moon, edited by Phillip C. Kolin and Sue Brennan Walker and the forthcoming The Beautiful, a collection of fifty poets representing fifty states. In addition to her academic work, she also writes essays, such as “A Woman Explains Why Learning Poetry is Poetry and Not Magic Made Her a Poet,” which appeared in the anthology Southern Writers on Writing. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut collection won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Recently Trimble has turned her attention to television, writing five episodes for the South African soapie, Die Testament, which aired in September 2019. Trimble holds the B.A. in English from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.
Trimble joined Nora’s Playhouse as an Artistic Associate in 2017 and served as the Associate Dramaturg for our 2018 co-production of A Doll’s House at Montgomery, Alabama’s Cloverdale Playhouse. In 2020, she joined our board and she and Dr. Sharon Friedman (NYU Gallatin) were named Nora’s Co-Literary Curators.
