SOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY POETRY PRIZE WINNERS FOR 2003

 

See Anthropology News 44(8):31.

 

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is pleased to announce two winners of the 2003 Poetry Prize: Heidi Kelley and Melisa Cahnmann.

 

Kelley won the prize for three poems: "In the Waiting Room," "Qué Sinvergüenza," and "Green is the Color of Galician Death."  Kelley is associate professor of anthropology and director of Liberal Arts Learning and Disabilities Services at the University of North Carolina-Ashville.  About her identity as poet-anthropologist, Kelley writes: "I began to write poetry when a massive stroke rendered me totally aphasic.  I entered my first poetry class with trepidation but quickly grew to love poetry's fascination with words and sounds.  I write my poetry about my fieldwork in Galicia (a region in Spain), among other things.  Recently, I have started a new research project, with my husband, Ken Betsalel, among other stroke survivors and their families and friends in North Carolina (in the 'buckle' of the 'stroke belt')."

 

Melisa Cahnmann won the prize for two poems: "American Defense" and "Driving through North Philly."  Cahnmann is assistant professor of language education at the University of Georgia.  She has published scholarly works in Anthropology News, Educational Researcher and elsewhere, as well as poetry in American Poetry Review, Quarterly West, and other literary publications.  She writes: "I am interested in the relationship between language, culture, literacy, and power.  I study multicultural education and multilingual classrooms as sites of social conflict, where possibilities exist for social change, justice and democracy.  I utilize a hybrid form of qualitative inquiry that embraces traditional methods alongside nontraditional, feminist, poetic, narrative and arts-based approaches."  Her current project explores the impact of study abroad in Mexico on teachers' formations of multicultural discourses and practices with culturally and linguistically diverse students.