Holy Cross English Professor Awarded $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

WORCESTER, Mass. – Robert Cording, professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, has received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in the amount of $20,000. The fellowship, awarded to only 45 writers nationwide, is intended to encourage the production of new works of poetry by affording recipients the time and means to write.

Cording has published four collections of poetry including Life-list, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal award, in l987; What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech Press, l991); Heavy Grace (Alice James, l996); and Against Consolation (CavanKerry Press, 2002); and has contributed more than 300 poems to magazines such as the Nation, Image, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, Paris Review and The New Yorker.

His work has appeared in several anthologies, including The Best Spiritual Writing of 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004; the Pushcart Anthology, 2002; and Godine’s Poets of the New Century. He has received a number of awards and grants including a previous fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 1992, he was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H.

A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 1977, Cording was honored with the College's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995. In 2002, he was named the James N. and Sarah L. O’Reilly Barrett Endowed Chair in Creative Writing.