POTSDAM – A SUNY Potsdam faculty member is one of 42 poets chosen, out of 1,063 applicants, to receive a $25,000 grant in support of his work.

Dr. James Allen Hall, an assistant professor in the college’s Department of English and Communication, is named a 2011 Creative Writing Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Being awarded an NEA Fellowship reaffirms that what I'm doing is worth the sacrifice of time I make to my poems: It validates the sacrifice of the whole weekends and late nights, after teaching and service obligations have ceased temporarily, that I spend reworking a single line," Hall said.

Selected through an anonymous review process, the prestigious fellowships encourage the production of new works of literature by allowing writers the time and means to write.

Hall has been a member of the SUNY Potsdam faculty since 2008. His first book of poems in 2008, "Now You're the Enemy," won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series Prize and several other awards, and pieces from the book have been published widely.