Diamond Forde shines at University of North Carolina-Asheville
By Lilliana Solovay
Sitting in an Asheville, North Carolina, barber shop one day in the middle of September, Diamond Forde decided she was hungry. To satisfy her appetite she headed to a quaint little barbecue spot across from the shop.
As she waited for her barbecue pork sandwich, she received a phone call from an unrecognizable number. Thinking it must be a spam call, Forde let the call go to voicemail.
The voicemail was from none other than Poetry magazine Editor Adrian Matejka, calling to tell Forde that she had been awarded a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
“I never thought I would get that call,” says Forde, a Florida State University English alumna. “It's really, really fulfilling to get that kind of recognition.”
The fellowship program, according to the Poetry Foundation, honors young poets and provides support for them early in their careers to encourage the further study and writing of poetry in the form of their choosing. Each poet receives a $25,800 prize; Forde was one of five winners.
As of May 2022, Forde is an FSU alumna, with her doctorate in creative writing, focused on African American Poetics and Fat Studies. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of West Georgia and her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Alabama. She is the author of Mother Body, which won the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize.
When Forde was working toward her undergraduate degree, UWG English Professor Chad Davidson introduced Forde to the fellowship she eventually won. He told Forde, “You should be applying for this,” an idea that "lived rent free” in her mind throughout her academic career.
“Even then, it felt kind of like a pipe dream,” Forde says. “It was this huge prize where hundreds, if not thousands, of people applied each year, and it always seemed so far away.”
After that year's Fellowship application deadline came and went, the ambition was still present in Forde.
“I really, really wanted it, and I just kept applying, kept applying, kept applying,” but was unable to succeed in getting the fellowship, she says.
Forde credits her winning application to her doctoral dissertation, which is titled The Book of Alice. The manuscript retells the books of the Old Testament through the lens of her maternal history. She defended her dissertation from Asheville, where she lives and is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.
“It was a wild ride,” Forde says, referring to her achievements.
It's really fulfilling to be in a community with really incredible poets doing really amazing things. To have somebody say that I deserve to be in that community is wild to me.
— Diamond Forde
In the middle of Forde's prelims at FSU, written exams that are to be completed in four hours, she was notified that she had moved to the top three candidates that qualified for the fellowship. She was expected to schedule campus visits which had to be balanced with her exams. Luckily, the exams were virtual.
“I would get up really early, get all dressed up as I would for an interview, then sit down and do my prelims,” Forde says. “I would sit there, and I would write my essays and then immediately jump into a Zoom call and do these interviews.”
In the midst of taking her prelims, Forde had multiple interviews with professors and the provost at UNC-Asheville. She also had to teach a mock class for 25 minutes, to show her ability to teach and interact with students.
Forde did so well at UNC-Asheville, and her students supported her so much, that the university converted her three-year fellowship into a tenure track job.
“Things are working out nicely,” says Forde, referring to her experiences in Asheville. “It's really fulfilling to be in a community with really incredible poets doing really amazing things. To have somebody say that I deserve to be in that community is wild to me.”
Lilliana Solovay is a junior double majoring in English-Editing, Writing, and Media and Political Science.
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