FARMINGTON — Jeffrey Thomson, University of Maine at Farmington associate professor of creative writing and poet-scholar, was recently named the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing affiliated with the prestigious Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

As the 2012 recipient of the only Fulbright Award dedicated to creative writing, Thomson will serve a six-month residency at Queen’s University Belfast, beginning in January 2012. While there, he will teach creative writing, conduct a postgraduate poetry workshop and offer public readings of his published work and work in progress through the Seamus Heaney Centre and Queen’s University School of English. In addition, Thomson will be working on a collection of poems based on his ancestors’ emigration experience.

Thomson is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, two limited-edition art books and the coeditor of an anthology of emerging poets. In 2010, he was awarded the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Maine Literary Award for Poetry for his fourth collection of poems, “Birdwatching in Wartime.” In addition, Thomson has been honored with a Fellowship in the Literary Arts from the Maine Arts Commission in 2008, a Creative Artists Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 2006 and a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005. He has also received fellowships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Sewanee Writers Conference and Writers @ Work.

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