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Kevin McFadden’s Hardscrabble, one of the inaugural titles in the VQR Poetry Series, published by the University of Georgia Press, has just been awarded 2008 Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry. The award, which recognizes work by emerging poets living in and writing on the South, will be presented in April 2009 at the Arts & Education Council Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Past winners include Charlotte Matthews and Thorpe Moeckel.

“I’ve known the Fellowship through its distinguished roll call of authors,” says McFadden. “Robert Penn Warren was one of my earliest influences in deciding to move to the South.” McFadden received the news from George Garrett, a founding member of the Fellowship, just before the acclaimed Southern novelist, essayist, and poet died in May. “All the reasons to be honored by this award reside in the generosity and warmth of a spirit like George’s, a spirit he helped kindle the Fellowship with.”

The Fellowship of Southern Writers was created in 1989 to nurture literature in the American South. Among its founding members were Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Walker Percy, Ernest Gaines, William Styron, and Elizabeth Spencer.