Previous Scholarship Winners
Alice Conger Patterson Scholarship
2011
Eli Connaughton is a published writer and graphic designer. She earned an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Honors include receiving the SC Arts Council Fiction Award and Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Prize. The Alice Conger Patterson award will allow Eli to create a strong draft of her current work, a memoir about her father, who suffered a stroke when she was only 12, and who passed away in December of 2010.
2010
The 2010 recipient of the Alice Conger Patterson Scholarship was Lisa Lopez Snyder. At the time she won Lisa lived in Columbia, SC, where she was an MFA student at USC in the three-year Creative Writing-Fiction program. Before that, she had a 25-year career as a healthcarejournalist. Her ultimate goal is to publish her work and to teach creative writing at the university level or at a nonprofit agency that works with underserved youth. She served as a fiction reader for Yemassee,the literary arts journal for USC’s program. Lisa also helped launch “Commit to Submit,” where peers meet and hold one another accountable for publication submissions. During the year prior to winning this scholarship, she had one poem and three stories published. She is working on a novel and has taught creative writing to elementary and high school students.Her $1,000 grant was used to attend the 2011 National Latino Writer’s Conference in Albuquerque and to present a half-day creative writing workshop to teen girls in Columbia.
2009
The 2009 recipient of the Alice Conger Patterson Scholarship was Tracie Morris Easler At the time she won, Tracie was studying in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Greenville Technical College with an emphasis in photography. In addition to photography, she has a passion for horses and farming. The intriguing project the scholarship helped with brought all these interests together. She documented photographically the lives and work of cowboys and cowgirls in South Carolina today. These photographs, entitled Carolina Cowboy, were exhibited at Riverworks, a galley operated by Greenville Technical College’s Department of Visual and Performing Arts in 2010. Tracie completed work on her Associate of Arts degree at Greenville Tech and planned to enroll at Converse College in the Art Education Program.
Photograph from Ms. Easler's exhibit
2008
Kiya Heartwood of Moore, S.C., is a musician who has been part of a “folk and roll” duo called Wishing Chair for the last 15 years. The two have performed in Canada and throughout the United States. Before that, Kiya lived in the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and was the lead singer and songwriter for a major-label rock band called Stealin’ Horses.
At the time she won the scholarship, Kiya was studying music composition at Converse College, and her Patterson Scholarship was applied to her tuition. She recently completed an original operetta for children, Lying to the Sea Gypsy. This 40-minute work debuted in the Upstate during the spring of 2009 and was quickly picked up by a troupe in Philadelphia. It was performed there at the end of May 2009..
On May 5, Kiya performed at the 2009 Emrys annual meeting at Greenville’s Centre Stage. She showcased a portion of her operetta and perform as part of Wishing Chair.
2007
Polly Gaillard Donahue used her award to assist toward tuition for a week-long course at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine in July, 2007. There Polly worked with Master photographer, Joyce Tenneson, one of the leading photographers of her generation. The workshop assisted Polly to further refine her portrait photography skills, and she will incorporate her new knowledge into classes she teaches locally. Polly holds a B.A. in Journalism from the University of South Carolina and teaches portrait photography classes at the WestEnd Darkroom and the Greenville County Museum of Art. In her career, she has had a number of solo exhibitions throughout the United States, and she was included in the Emrys Photography Exhibit, Waking the World” in 2002. Recently, Polly’s images for A Child’s Haven project were so successful that the agency will use her portraits to tell stories of Greenville’s children in poverty.
2006
In 2006, the Emrys Foundation awarded the Alice Conger Patterson scholarship to Terri McCord, a poet from Greenville, SC., which will assist her in funding a four-week writing residency (May 14-June9) at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. While having an opportunity to work with poets Bob Hicok and Laurie Scheck, Ms. McCord will also have time to finish her book-length poetry manuscript entitled The Rose Spot.
Ms. McCord is a graduate of Furman University and holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte, N.C. Her poems have been included in anthologies published by Ninety-Six Press and Hub City Press as well as numerous other publications across the country. She teaches English at Greenville Technical College and has also been an instructor and guest artist at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and the Fine Arts Center. We have had the pleasure of hearing Ms. McCord read her poems at two prior Emrys Reading Room series events
2005
Two women shared the Alice Conger Patterson Award in 2005. One recipient was Gail Crawford, a Mental Health Clinical Nurse Specialist who now is Palliative Care Coordinator at the Greenville Hospital System. She has published articles in professional nursing journals and in 2003 was honored as a recipient of the Palmetto Gold, an award that identifies the finest nurses in the state. Gail will use her money to work with a professional writer at a writers’ workshop. She wants to complete stories about caring for her father and hopes to use those writings in workshops with nurses, workshops that focus on the value of journaling as a way of coping with stressful life events.
The other recipient was Angela Cravens, a graduate of Wade Hampton High School and the Fine Arts Center and of SCAD. Angela is an active woodworker interested in increasing her visibilty and in buying equipment that will make “the difference between ‘craft’ work without the fine details and ‘fine art’ with the fine details. She will use the scholarship money to, as she said, “completely change my career (or way of earning income) to more naturally suit the creative artist that I have always been.”
2004
The two women chosen as recipients of the Alice Conger Patterson Scholarship in 2004 by the Scholarship Committee were Nancy Harris and Cynthia Nedved. The Patterson scholarship is named in honor of an early president of the Emrys Foundation, and in 2004 each winner received a $500 award.
Nancy Harris of Greenville is a photographer and an MFA candidate at Rockport College in Maine. Nancy is working on a series of photographs that will portray illusory thoughts of a segment in time of a Southern woman’s life. The photographs will be accompanied by a written narrative, part of which is an invented/remembered history concerning Southern women. Nancy says that through a gothic presentation of Southern archetypal women, landscapes, and architecture, her own grief and loss have surfaced; she hopes her work will be a means of sharing what she learns in this process. Nancy will use her scholarship partially to fund the work needed to complete the MFA.
Cynthia Nedved, is also a Greenville resident who has returned as an adult student to Furman to finish the education she postponed to support her husband and herself and then to raise children. Now Cindy is a visual arts major and next year will be a senior at Furman, with all A’s (so far). She’ll use her scholarship to help pay for some of the art supplies she’ll need for her final year.
A Room of One’s Own
2009
The “A Room of One’s Own” cabin residency went to Jeanne Malgrem in 2009. She used the time to write, including an essay that was included in the Hub City Press publication, Outdoor Adventures in the Upcountry.
2010
The 2010 “A Room of One’s Own” cabin residency was awarded to Sue Lile Inman. Sue used this retreat to write, focusing on completing a novel she is working on.