Cahnmann Wins Top $10,000 Prize in National Poetry Contest

Melisa Cahnmann, an assistant professor in language and literacy education, has received the top prize of $10,000 in a national contest for poets under age 40.

Cahnmann's winning entry in the first annual Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Contest consisted of three poems, Habitat for Humanity, a villanelle; Inspiration, a free form verse poem; and Icaria, a sonnet. Her poems were selected as top winner from 154 entries from across the nation and Australia, Belgium, Canada, England and Malaysia.

Cahnmann's poetry has been published in a variety of literary journals and she is currently enrolled in the low residency Master of Fine Arts program at New England College. Her research, teaching and poetry often focus on bilingualism, cross-cultural identity, and multicultural education. She directs the FUND (Finding Unity in Diversity) project that takes teachers out of classrooms and puts them into the communities where Latino and African American students and families live, work, play and pray.

But writing award-winning poetry is nothing new for the College of Education faculty member, her work has won several contests in the last several years.

“I've been writing since I was a young girl. It helped me through a difficult time in my childhood around the 5th or 6th grade,” said Cahnmann. “I started to take myself more seriously as a writer when I was a third-grade teacher in Los Angeles and joined the UCLA Writing Project for Teachers. This program helped me to see myself as a teacher and a poet and the two were mutually informative. Now, we have the same program here at UGA — the Red Clay Writing Project.”

The contest was established by the late Marvin Rosenberg, professor emeritus in the department of theatre arts at the University of California at Berkley, in memory of his first wife, Dororthy Sargent Rosenberg.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005
WRITER: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
CONTACT: Melisa Cahnmann, 706/583-8127, cahnmann@uga.edu