 Memye Curtis Tucker
43rd Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards
June 2, 2007
Kennesaw State University
On June 2, 2007, at Kennesaw State University and as part of the 43rd Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards, Georgia Writers Association took great pleasure in honoring Memye Curtis Tucker with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Memye Curtis Tucker, whose poetry collection The Watchers (Ohio University Press, 1998) was chosen by Louis Simpson for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, is also the author of three chapbooks: Admit One (State Street Press Prize), Storm Line (Palanquin Press Prize), and Holding Patterns (Poetry Atlanta Press). Since 1981, her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Oxford American Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Review and others and in anthologies, and will be featured in the Summer 2007 Kennesaw Review. They have been featured in translation in Korea’s Shidae Munhuck, set as art song released in the U.S. and U.K., and as the text of an Austrian artist’s book. Since 1989 she has taught advanced poetry writing at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Atlanta, and since 1993 has been a Senior Editor of Atlanta Review, where poems from her issues have received Pushcart and Poetry Daily publication.
She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Emory University, an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and a B.A. in English Literature from Agnes Scott College.
Dr. Tucker won her first First-Place Prize in poetry as an undergraduate student from Randall Jarrell. Also as an undergraduate, she won the Bennett Trophy for acting, and as a poet has given more than a hundred readings, including Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, The University of Toronto, Poetry at Tech, and the Georgia Poetry Circuit, and has been featured with such poets as Galway Kinnell and Eavan Boland.
She has received Individual Artist Grants from the Georgia Council for the Arts, Bread Loaf’s John Ciardi Poetry Scholarship, and residency fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences. Her Callanwolde poetry students, also, have won artist grants, fellowships, chapbook and other prizes; some are teaching at universities.
Dr. Tucker has taught courses in Shakespeare, poetry and critical theory at Adelphi and Emory Universities and Agnes Scott College and written articles and papers on Shakespearean comedy, literary theory, and Northrop Frye for universities and scholarly conferences in the U.S. and Canada.
Active in the larger community, as well, she served as President of the Agnes Scott College National Alumnae Association and later as Alumna Trustee of the college, and in 1995 received the Distinguished Alumna Award for Service to Agnes Scott. She played a central role in opening the Cobb Youth Museum, and for 25 years, hundreds of thousands of children on tour have seen the original puppet plays she wrote and directed for its theatre. She is a co-founder of Volunteer Cobb-Marietta and of the Literary Round Table in Marietta.
She has also served on the advisory boards of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, Georgia Poetry Society, and Poetry Atlanta, and on peer review panels for the Georgia Council for the Arts. In 1988, she received the Sullivan Award from the Cobb Arts Council for Leadership in the Arts.
All of the above represents only a portion of Dr. Tucker's accomplishments. She is celebrated and loved as a teacher of and mentor to many other poets.
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