Local poet wins Maine Arts Commission Fellowship

 

Lee Sharkey

- Submitted Photo

 

Lee Sharkey

- Submitted Photo

VIENNA — The Maine Arts Commission has named a local poet recipient of the 2010 Artists' Fellowship Award for Literary Arts.

 Lee Sharkey, a retired professor from the University of Maine and now co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, had her work recently selected from 90-entries by an out-of-state panel as this year's prize winner. Along with the recognition comes a $13,000 grant that will give her time to continue her work and perhaps finish a new manuscript, she said.

For the third straight year, the winner of this prize has had a strong connection to the Farmington area, which shows the quality of literary endeavor in the area, she said. Jeff Thomson who teaches poetry at UMF was the 2008 winner, and Penelope Schwartz Robinson, who also teaches at UMF, won in 2009.

The 20-page manuscript that was submitted contained poems and some from Sharkey's work from "A Darker, Sweeter String," which was published in 2008 by Off the Grid Press of Weld.

  She has also published two other full-length volumes including one, "To A Vanished World," that responds to Roman Vishniac's photographs of Easter European Jewry in the years preceding the Nazi Holocaust, and the other entitled, "Farmwife."

"Writing has just always been with me. I've always found magic in language and love the sound of words," Sharkey said of a nearly life-long endeavor. She won class Olympian of poetry in the fourth grade, she said, but has been seriously committed to writing since her mid-teens.

"It's been a vehicle of growth and maturity. What I needed to learn from life, I learned from writing poems," she added.

Sharkey came to Maine in 1971, bought a 100-year-old printing press and taught herself to set type. She then printed and published her own small chapbooks of poetry.

She's taught writing at the University, working with students and teachers of all ages, and lead a writing workshop for adults with mental illnesses.

She left the University two years ago to devote more energy to both her writing and the Beloit Poetry Journal, which she now co-edits with John Rosenwald. The journal is a quarterly publication with an international circulation. It is celebrating its 60th birthday this year, she said.

Sharkey and her husband, Al Bersbach, reside in Vienna.

She will read from her work at an award ceremony on Oct. 23 in Rockland.

She expressed her appreciation for the Maine Arts Commission, which has nurtured the arts in Maine for four decades. The commission supports Maine artists and enlivens the communities they live in by bringing art and artists into schools and other institutions, she said.

"The Maine Arts Commission has also been a national leader in identifying and supporting the arts within communities as an engine of innovation and economic growth, what's now known as the creative economy," she said.

abryant@sunjournal.com