The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts is designed to encourage the development of young Christian writers and scholars and to help prepare them for teaching in Christian universities. Carlson will receive an annual monetary award for three years to help with her education, will be assigned a mentor, and will participate in yearly conferences with other Lilly Graduate Fellows each year.
She will begin graduate studies this fall at the University of Arkansas, where she has been accepted into the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program with an emphasis on poetry. Carlson already had distinguished herself as an undergraduate.
Carlson graduated Magna Cum Laude from Indiana Wesleyan University in 2007 with a double major in English and writing. While a student at IWU, she worked as a writing center tutor, an editor and staff writer for the student newspaper, and a co-editor of the undergraduate literary magazine, Caesura.
Her prose and poetry has been featured in Ruminate Magazine, Wicked Alice, the Cedarville Review, and Covenant Home Altar. In 2007, she won second place in the poetry division of the Conference on Christianity & Literature’s annual Student Writing Contest. Recently she won honorable mention in the 2008 Utmost Christian Poetry Contest.
Russell Carlson is pastor of Forest Park Covenant Church in Muskegon, Michigan.
