UM Faculty Members, Alumni Win MIAL Honors

Derrick Harriell wins Poetry Award, William Beckwith honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

Derrick Harriell, assistant professor of English and African American Studies, speaks at the Oxford Conference for the Book.

Derrick Harriell, assistant professor of English and African-American Studies, speaks at the Oxford Conference for the Book.

OXFORD, Miss. – A University of Mississippi faculty member and others with UM ties were among those honored by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters earlier this year for works first published, performed or shown in the year 2013.

Award winners include Derrick Harriell, UM assistant professor of English and African-American studies; alumnus and author Steve Yarbrough; Jesmyn Ward, a former Grisham-Writer-in-Residence; and the university’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award went to sculptor William N. Beckwith, an adjunct assistant professor of art at the university.

The award recipients, chosen by out-of-state judges prominent in their respective fields, will be honored at the annual Awards Banquet, set for June 7 in the Grand Hall of the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. At 1 p.m. that day, readings and signings by award winners will take place at Lemuria Bookstore.

Founded in 1978, MIAL aims to recognize the elite in fiction, nonfiction, visual art, musical composition, photography and poetry. The award is coveted and highly competitive.

Harriell the won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2014 Poetry Award for his new collection of poems, “Ropes” (Willow Books).

“Receiving the news that my collection of poems ‘Ropes’ won the MIAL Award was gratifying in so many ways,” Harriell said. “I’m happy contributing to the high standard set by our English department and MFA program. Having only been in Oxford for a year-and-a-half, I’m pleased to be embraced both personally and professionally.”

In 2010, Harriell composed his first collection of poems, “Cotton” (Willow Books). For the follow-up, “Ropes,” he focused on the lives of black boxers in America.

Harriell was born and raised in Milwaukee. He has a doctorate in English from University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Chicago State University. He has worked as an assistant poetry editor for Third World Press and The Cream City Review, and has taught countless writing workshops for students of all ages. He is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and his work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies.

The award reflects well on the university, said Ivo Kamps, professor and chair of the UM Department of English.

“This is quite an honor for Derrick, for the department and the university,” Kamps said. “(Harriell) is relatively new to the university and the state of Mississippi, but he is already making a significant impact on our literary culture and our students. We are pleased and fortunate to have him on our faculty.”

Yarbrough is the winner of the Fiction Award for his novel “The Realm of Last Chances” (Alfred A. Knopf). Jeffrey Lent says of “The Realm of Last Chances,” “This novel is that rare achievement, a page-turner that also turns pages within the reader.”

This is the second MIAL Fiction Award for Yarbrough, who was born in Indianola and is a professor at Emerson College in Boston. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from UM and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. He is the author of eight books, and in 2010, he won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence.

Ward was the winner of the Nonfiction Award for “Men We Reaped: A Memoir” (Bloomsbury). The DeLisle native earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Grisham Writer-in-Residence at UM. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama.

Ward won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction for her novel “Salvage the Bones” (Bloomsbury, 2011). “Men We Reaped: A Memoir” is an elegy to her brother and four other young black men who lost their lives in her hometown.

Beckwith, a native of Greenville who lives in Taylor, teaches sculpture and 3-D design at UM.  He earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sculpture from the university and studied with Leon Koury, Bob Tompkins and Charles Gross.

He has produced public and private bronzes for more than 40 years and is widely known for his portrait busts and public monuments for such icons as William Faulkner, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Jefferson Davis, L.Q.C. Lamar, Jim Henson and Coach Margaret Wade.  In 1976 Mr. Beckwith formed Mississippi’s first commercial fine art bronze foundry with Wallace Mallette.

His work has been exhibited in Splashlight Studios and Frank Marino Gallery in New York, in the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, at the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans and at the Smithsonian Institutionin Washington. Beckwith has won numerous awards and honors and is represented in public and private collections across the nation.

For information about attending this year’s Awards Banquet, visit the MIAL website at http://www.Ms-arts-letters.org.