Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble ’83 Selected as an NEA Creative Writing Fellow

Montgomery, Ala.— Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Huntingdon College Class of 1983 and a former Huntingdon professor of English, has been selected as a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Dr. Trimble is one of 35 national recipients chosen from among 1601 eligible applicants. The award, announced last week, carries a $25,000 fellowship to support her writing.

“The NEA creative writing fellowships go to poetry every other year, and out of 35 honorees this year two are from Alabama,” said Dr. Jennifer Fremlin, chair of the Huntingdon Department of Language and Literature and professor of English. “I think this proves that Alabama is indeed rich and fertile ground for growing the arts. Those lucky enough to have been students or colleagues of Dr. Jackie Trimble know that she is first and foremost a teacher, and her poetry is an extension of that drive to help us all learn to see the world as it is: unvarnished and truthful and painful and beautiful all at the same time.”

Dr. Trimble is a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2017 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore, and in anthologies including “The Night’s Magician: Poems About the Moon,” edited by Phillip C. Kolin and Sue Brennan Walker, and the forthcoming “The Beautiful,” a collection of fifty poets representing fifty states. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Trimble writes essays, such as “A Woman Explains Why Learning Poetry is Poetry and Not Magic Made Her a Poet,” which appeared in the anthology “Southern Writers on Writing.”

Published by NewSouth Books, “American Happiness,” her debut collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Jennifer Horne, poet laureate of Alabama, wrote about the collection, “Her grace is in the anger distilled to the bitter draft you savor as it bites,” and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, scholar/poet/novelist and Alabama Writers Hall of Fame inductee wrote, “I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the-flesh poems, this verse that sings the old-time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty.” Randall Horton noted, “There is a jewel of a poet in the epicenter of Alabama who adeptly revisits the ugly of race, the power and legacy of familial bonds, the joys and beauty of growing up Southern—our complicated humanity.”

Recently Dr. Trimble has turned her attention to television, writing five episodes for the South African soapie, “Die Testament,” which aired in September 2019.

Dr. Trimble earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.

Huntingdon College continues a legacy of faith, wisdom, and service through a liberal arts academic tradition grounded in the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United Methodist Church.

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