MACON, Ga. — Mercer University‘s James Davis May, Ph.D., associate professor of English and director of creative writing, was awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship. The highly competitive scholarship is a high-value annual award that funds an American-born poet to spend one full year traveling outside of North America.
“The list of past winners of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship is like a who’s who in American poetry,” said Elizabeth Harper, Ph.D., Griffith Chair and associate professor in the English department. “It’s really delightful to see Dr. May on that list now too.”
The Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship is one of the nation’s major literary awards. Amy Lowell, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, was one of the key figures in Modernist poetry.
The award specifies two requirements:
1. The winner of the scholarship must live outside of North America for one full year.
2. The winner must provide the trustees with three poems written while abroad.
The scholarship was first awarded in 1953, and the awardees include some of the most influential poets in American literature.
“Initially, I was stunned,” May said. “I stammered through the phone call from the trustee. I think I managed to say, ‘Wow’ and ‘thank you’ several times, but I’m not sure I was articulate beyond that. I’ve spent much of the time since receiving the scholarship saying, ‘Me? Really?’ both in my head and sometimes out loud. I don’t think I’ll be able to quiet that voice down — in fact, I think it’s good to listen to it because this is such a rare opportunity and the only way to approach it is as an unlikely but generous gift.”
“It’s too early to say what that next book will look like, but lately, in my writing, teaching and reading, I’ve been drawn to different definitions of the sacred,” said May. “So I know I’ll be visiting sacred sites in Ireland, Italy, France and the UK.”
Harper said that while the award is not well-known outside creative writing circles, more than a third of recent Lowell Scholarship award winners have gone on to win the better-known Guggenheim Awards, National Endowment for the Arts grants and MacArthur Genius Grants.
May won’t start his fellowship until after the fall semester. His third book, My Lost Saints, will be published in early 2027, and he plans to use his time abroad to promote the book to an international audience and begin writing his next poetry collection.
May’s most recent book, Unusually Grand Ideas, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2023 and named to the Georgia Center for the Book’s list of Books All Georgians Should Read. He has received a literature fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walter E. Dakin fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Robert Frost Poetry Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He also won the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Award and the Rattle Poetry Prize’s Readers’ Choice Award.
