Fellowships Advisor Eleanor Stanford has been named runner-up for the 2024 Alpine Fellowship poetry prize for her poem “What Happened.”
Each year, The Alpine Fellowship selects a winner and runners-up in different categories pertaining to the arts and humanities from international entries that focus on a particular theme. This year’s theme was Language. “’What Happened’ is partly about the inability of language to encompass experience—the desire to say what happened, then the ways that ultimately seems to fall short,” explains Stanford.
The winner and runners-up of each category receive cash prizes and are invited to attend the Alpine Fellowship Foundation annual symposium, which will take place in Tuscany this summer. “I'm excited to meet the other participants since the fellowship is interdisciplinary and has awards for music, theater arts, philosophy, in addition to poetry,” says Stanford.
Stanford's fourth book, Blue Yodel, will be coming out in October from Carnegie Mellon University Press. “I’m inspired by the natural world and the intensity and strangeness of intimate relationships,” she says. “Many of the poems in this upcoming book are inspired by music: jazz standards, old country music, and bossa nova.”
Stanford has been the fellowships advisor at Bryn Mawr for six years, supporting students through all stages of the fellowship application process. “I love getting to work with students and help them imagine and begin to realize exciting future opportunities for themselves,” she says. She also teaches an Emily Balch Seminar on Personal Narrative and the Creation of Self.
For more on Stanford’s poetry and collections, visit her website.