This is a story of two Spartan MFA poets, born six decades apart. Sage Short ’26 MFA, a Myrtle Beach native with roots in West Virginia, grew up in post-9/11 America. After graduating from Coastal Carolina University, she got a master’s at Clemson, where she was assistant editor of the South Carolina Review. There, she was awarded the English department’s best thesis award and their award for excellence in teaching.
“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher,” she says. And poetry is her calling, too. Inspired by a former professor of hers, Dan Albergotti ’02 MFA, she came for her MFA in Creative Writing at UNCG, where teaching is part of the process. A McAllister Scholarship helped make it possible. In her second year of the program, she was appointed poetry editor of The Greensboro Review.
And she was named the inaugural recipient of the Kelly Cherry MFA in Creative Writing Endowed Graduate Fellowship, with its helpful funding.
An alumna who earlier blazed a similar path, Kelly Cherry ’67 MFA had grown up in the 1940s-50s wartime and post-WW II era. “For Cherry, poetry was a way of knowing; a way of testing what is real with the discipline of a scientist or philosopher, but never at the expense of the heart,” says Terry Kennedy ’99 MFA, director of UNCG’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. “Some of that may trace back to her mentor, Fred Chappell, though in her work it becomes wholly her own.”
Not only a prolific poet, but novelist, essayist, and literary critic, she found teaching was her passion, too. She served as professor for 22 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After retirement there, she continued to teach at various universities.
The poet laureate of Virginia (2010-12) published 30 books. She received the UNCG Alumni Award of Distinction in 2009. Through a planned gift, she established the scholarship in 2016.
Had Short read Cherry’s work? She tells the story: Years ago, Albergotti encouraged her to attend a writers’ conference, and there she spied a Kelly Cherry book of poetry at a display for Greensboro’s Unicorn Press, run by Andrew Saulters ’08 MFA. The distinctive cover piqued her interest. Having never read her work, Short read the first poem.
“Oh wow,” she reacted, and bought the book. Today, the inaugural Kelly Cherry Fellow still has it on her bookshelf.
A full circle moment – and perfectly poetic.
by Mike Harris ’93 MA