Poet awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Christina Pugh is working on Stardust Media, a collection of poems. —Photo: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin

UIC poet Christina Pugh was awarded a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship in creative arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Pugh, professor of English who teaches in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Program for Writers, is one of 10 poetry fellows this year.

She will work on Stardust Media, a collection of poems about encounters with various technologies, both ancient and contemporary.

“I was inspired by Robert Frost’s long blank verse poems and their ability to track digressions and detours in a poetic speaker’s thought processes,” she said.

Pugh is the author of three books of poems: Grains of the Voice, Restoration and Rotary, which won the Word Press First Book Prize. Her fourth book of poetry, Perception, is scheduled to be published in 2017.

She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from Poetry magazine and her poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review and the Poetry 180 anthology.