Local poets awarded individual artist fellowships

Two Sussex County poets have been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts.

These honors recognize artists in a variety of disciplines for their outstanding quality of work and provide monetary awards.

Alice Morris of Lewes received $3,000 with an Emerging Artist Fellowship in Literature: Poetry.

Linda Blaskey of Lincoln received $10,000 and the 2022 Masters Fellowship in Literature: Poetry.

Morris earned her master’s degree in counseling from Johns Hopkins. Besides being a prize-winning poet, she is also an accomplished carpenter and woodworker, and her white oak baskets made from hand-split trees were featured in the New York Art Review, and in West Virginia, Our Heritage. She turned to writing and poetry in her 50s, and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Morris believes there is always another creative adventure and risk to take. She has lived in Lewes for the past 34 years. She is a member of Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild and Coastal Writers.

Blaskey was born in Plainfield, N.J., and grew up in Arkansas and Kansas before landing in Delaware, where she graduated from Milford High School in 1965. Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2014, and in North Carolina’s Poetry on the Bus project for National Poetry Month. She is poetry/interview editor emerita for Broadkill Review, and current editor for Quartet, an online poetry journal created by women over 50 to feature the works of their own demographic. She coordinates the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize and is author of three poetry collections, one a collaboration with the three other editors at Quartet. She has a book forthcoming this April. She is a member and co-founder of Coastal Writers, which meets at the Rehoboth Art League, although meetings have been temporarily suspended during the pandemic.

This year, 132 artists applied and 25 were awarded fellowships in different categories – one Masters, 13 Established and 11 Emerging.