By Daily Press staff
A Santa Monica College professor will take her talents abroad this summer.
SMC adjunct English professor and accomplished poet Carol Davis has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholar’s Award to teach and lecture on contemporary American literature in St. Petersburg and throughout Russia.
This is Davis’ second Fulbright award, having spent the 1996-97 academic year as a senior Fulbright scholar in creative writing, teaching modern Jewish literature at Petersburg Jewish University. This time, she will spend the fall semester teaching at the Center for American and British Studies at St. Petersburg State University, and lecturing and giving poetry readings in Moscow and other areas of Russia, some of them remote.
This is the second Fulbright Scholar award to be given to an SMC professor in the past year. This past spring, English professor Karin Costello was a lecturer at Intercollege in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Davis, of Mar Vista, who is fluent in Russian, has been teaching English at SMC for five years.
She is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in such publications as Atlanta Review, Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review and New American Review.
Her first book, “Letters from Prague,” was published by Paper Bag Press in 1991. A full-length collection,” It’s Time to Talk About...,” was published in a bilingual edition in Russia in 1997. A new small book of poetry, “The Violin Teacher,” is scheduled to come out in November 2005 from Dancing Girls Press in Chicago. Her work also is included in several anthologies.
Honors include an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience and the Reuben Rose Poetry Competition in Israel. She also has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, considered one of the most prestigious literary prizes in America. She has had her poetry read on National Public Radio.
Davis received her bachelor’s degree in Russian language and literature from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University. She studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she received her master’s degree in Slavic languages and literatures.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 2, 2005. Read the original PDF.