Bethany Fitts and Gabrielle Schust each given $5,000 to fulfill dream projects

FEBRUARY 21, 2018 BY EDWIN B. SMITH

Gabrielle Schust (left) and Bethany Fitts are congratulated by Dean Douglass Sullivan-González after receiving Barksdale Awards during the Honors College’s annual spring convocation. Photo by Thomas Graning/Ole Miss Communications

With $5,000 awards to support separate creative projects, two students in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi have been named 2018 Barksdale Award winners.

Bethany Fitts, a junior English and history major from Tupelo, and Gabrielle Schust, a junior international studies and Spanish major from Columbia, Missouri, were presented the awards during the Honors College’s annual spring convocation Tuesday (Feb. 20).

The Barksdale Awards were established in 2005 to encourage students to test themselves in environments beyond the classroom, teaching lab or library. Fitts and Schust are the 23rd and 24th recipients of the honor.

“Our Barksdale Award winners have proposed tasks that will help them help us push our understanding of being human and being in this world,” said Douglas Sullivan-González, dean of the Honors College. “Bethany and Gabrielle are each taking on both a troubled past and a troubled present, seeking the connections that give hope and ways forward. I am proud that the Barksdale Award can fund such visions.”

Fitts will spend time in Washington state and in Hawaii, gaining ground-level experience with several kindred topics: poetry publication, conservation and W.S. Merwin, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a founder of a conservancy housing more than 400 species of endangered palm trees.

In Washington, with the well-respected Copper Canyon Press, she will gain hands-on experience with everything about poetry publication, from helping to organize community events to editing and marketing. At the Merwin Conservancy in Maui, Fitts will work in its education program and alongside the conservancy’s gardener. As a follow-up, she hopes to promote similar poetry/ecology work in all 50 states and to write her own collection of poems drawn from her experiences.

“As a writer and lover of words, I have always been curious about the ways in which literature, particularly poetry, intersects with real people and the world’s concerns,” said Fitts, who expects to graduate in May 2020. “Many people view poetry as separate from the world, and while this view does not necessarily diminish poetry’s value, I simply think that it is wrong. I think that, now more than ever, our country and our world must wake up to the political, social and environmental concerns that we have allowed to develop, and one way to engage with this waking process is poetry.”

Fitts serves as editorial assistant for the Ole Miss Alumni Review and as creative content editor for the undergraduate Populi Magazine. Last year, she won the English department’s Campbell Award. Fitts volunteers with Mississippi Votes and, last summer, was an intern with the Sunflower County Freedom Project, where she taught literacy, gardening and creative writing to students. Her questions have to do with the poet’s role in today’s chaotic society, and her own identity as a poet in that world and in Mississippi as it exists today.

Fitts has worked with Daniel Stout, associate professor of British literature.

“Bethany is a student of particular academic gifts, but her truly distinguishing quality is the depth and energy of her commitment to an interdisciplinary life of the mind,” Stout wrote in a letter of recommendation. “She is the true model of the citizen scholar, interested in how literature helps people interact with their surroundings, in literature as a form of social enrichment.”

Schust will travel to England to collect oral histories of older women in religious orders whose charitable works in the 1960s and early 1970s (pre-National Health Service) focused on medical care for the poor, especially for women or children. She has already contacted three such orders and arranged interviews with eight sisters, the eldest of whom is now 103.

By collecting their stories, Schust hopes to gain insights into any changes over the past 70 years in how women in religious life had provided social services for the poor. She plans to capture the interviews on camera and create a mini-documentary, so that there will be a “window into the world of these women and the communities in which they worked.”

During an academic year in Lima, Peru, next year, Schust will conduct research into similar work being conducted in the Andes by women in religious orders.

The statistics about poverty, maternal/fetal mortality rates and life expectancy in today’s Andes and England before the National Health Service are “striking,” Schust said. She hopes to determine how today’s efforts compare and provide an assessment for how the Andean practices might be improved upon.

Schust has volunteered as an ACT Prep Class instructor and with the Oxford Film Festival, as well as for various local and national political campaigns. She is a member of Model UN and involved with UM’s Ghostlight Repertory Theatre and participates in youth and community theatre at home in Missouri.

Schust spent a summer in Bolivia in the field school of Kate Centellas, Croft associate professor of sociology and anthropology.

“I remember Gabrielle sitting and talking with her host family for hours, as she heard their stories and learned more about them and their perspectives,” Centellas said. “That time helped her understand the power of oral histories in the context of social science research. Her project is timely and innovative, and it needs doing.”

For more information about the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, visit https://www.honors.olemiss.edu/.

Beth Ann Fennelly, professor of English and Mississippi Poet Laureate, is the featured guest on Conversations.

https://www.facebook.com/coppercanyonpress/videos/10159355852580315/

“Poetry offers an attention to the world, to beauty, and to love. I think that’s a form of activism: inviting people in this hurting world to see animals and nature and human relationships differently, and to take refuge in beauty.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of OCEANIC

Here’s what Aimee says about working with Copper Canyon:

“For over twenty years I’ve eagerly read books from Copper Canyon Press — my bookshelf is full of well-worn and dog-eared favorites. They’ve ushered in a stunning array of diverse voices throughout the years and I’m truly honored they are about to publish my latest collection.

I’ve been reading Copper Canyon books since I first started studying poetry. I learned about voice from C.D. Wright; the quiet loveliness of staying with an image from W.S. Merwin; and fierce fire from Lucille Clifton. OCEANIC will be the first book of mine to appear with that iconic pressmark.”

Aimee was born in Chicago to a Filipina mother and a father from South India. She is the author of three previous collections of poetry. She has served as returning faculty at Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Retreat, and with Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook, Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens. Awards for her writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, and being selected as the 2016-17 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence. Aimee is poetry editor of Orion Magazine, widely recognized as one of America’s leading environmental magazines. Her collection of nature essays is forthcoming from Milkweed. She is professor of English in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

 “Sounds of Earth: 40 Years of Voyager’s Golden LP and the Poetry That Spun From It”

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. Mixology was also a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. His most recent collection of poems, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His new book, Map to the Stars, was released from Penguin in March 2017. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, two grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Julia Peterkin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is currently working on a new collection of poems, Hearing Damage, and a graphic novel.

The Lecture will take place on November 15th at 6 p.m. at The Depot.  This event is free and open to the public.

Mission Statement
The Edith T. Baine Lecture Series for Scholars and Writers invites the best and brightest scholars and writers to our campus. The Baine lecturers and writers are chosen on the basis of energetic and engaged scholarship and creative work, innovative approaches, and dynamic presentation styles. The lectures showcase paradigm-shifting research and groundbreaking writing. The visiting scholars and writers are intended to expose undergraduates to the fullness of a life deeply engaged in literature while inspiring graduate students to pursue ambitious work.

Edith T. Baine
Mrs. Edith Turley Baine of El Dorado was born November 29, 1945 in Greenville, Mississippi, the daughter of Edith Waits Turley and George Turley. She graduated from Leland High School and the University of Mississippi, where she received B.A.E. and M.A.E. degrees. Mrs. Baine was a member of the First Presbyterian Church of El Dorado, El Dorado Service League, Phi Mu Sorority and Delta Theta Phi Law Fraternity International. She was a former member of the Board of Directors of the Union County Humane Society. She was an El Dorado Jaycettes and later became an El Dorado Jaycee. She was a tree farmer and retired English teacher who taught in Mississippi and at El Dorado High School. On April 13, 2012, Mrs. Baine passed away at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock. Her generous gift to the English Department at the University of Mississippi supports this lecture series and promotes academic and creative exchange.

Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Alumnus and author will teach courses in Southern studies and English