University of New Hampshire Student, Sarah Stickney, Receives Prestigious Fulbright Scholarship

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Sarah Stickney

DURHAM, NH (05/19/2010)(readMedia)-- Sarah Stickney is one of four students from the University of New Hampshire that has received the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship that will provide her support to conduct research abroad during the 2010-2011 academic year.

The students are Tyler King, UNH '10, of Alton; Bethany Wakeman, UNH '10, of Barrington; Kristina Reardon, UNH G'11, of Uxbridge, Mass.; and Sarah Stickney, UNH G'10, Santa Fe, NM.

Each year, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards grants to exceptional American students for study in more than 140 countries.

Stickney will conduct research in Bologna, Italy. Through her Fulbright project, "The Translation and Study of Immigrant Poets in Italy," Stickney will study the new movement of immigrant writers who are producing literature in Italian. She will spend the year working with Albanian poet Gezim Hajdari, winner of the prestigious Montale Prize, and with editors of the University of Bologna's Scritture Migranti, a publication devoted to disseminating the works of immigrant writers.

According to Stickney, immigration laws seemed to have encouraged relocation to Italy during the last 20 years. "Many of the immigrants come from Africa, many from Albania, and some from as far away as Brazil and Palestine," Stickney says. "The first writing these men and women produced was largely autobiographical, and often required the help of Italian translators. The high quality of these first narratives sparked an interest that encouraged the writers to learn Italian."

Stickney explains that since some of these first generation immigrant writers pushed themselves to learn the language and to write in Italian, "they write from two traditions and two perspectives. Their poetry exists in a particularly rich arena of language and thought. This work is not only contemporary and influential, it speaks to all people."

Fluent in Italian, Stickney says her task will be "to cull and translate a representative selection of their poems, which I will publish in the United States. I am interested in the unique culture that these writers have created. An educated, motivated group of artists, they have convened to work and communicate in a language that is no member's mother tongue. They represent a fascinating moment in the history of world literature, and I want to record it."

Stickney will graduate from UNH this month with a master's in poetry writing. While at UNH, Stickney won the 2007 Anne Pazo Mayberry Award for Poetry, the 2009 Dick Shea Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Young Dawkins III award for the best thesis. Her work appeared recently in two publications, Lament and Scarab Magazine. In 2009, Stickney also received the Award in Teaching Excellence from the University of New Hampshire Graduate School.

The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state's flagship public institution, enrolling more than 12,200 undergraduate and 2,200 graduate students.