Santa Monica College adjunct English professor and poet Carol Davis has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar’s Award to teach and lecture on Contemporary American Literature in St. Petersburg and throughout Russia.
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 Davis’ second Fulbright award. She previously spent the 1996-97 academic year as a senior Fulbright scholar in Creative Writing, teaching modern Jewish literature at Petersburg Jewish University.
This is the second Fulbright Scholar award to be given to an SMC professor in the past year. English professor Karin Costello was a lecturer at Intercollege in Nicosia, Cyprus in the spring.
Davis, of Mar Vista, who is fluent in Russian, has taught 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, a chapbook, 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 is also 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 has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in America, and her poetry has been read on National Public Radio.
Davis has lectured and read her poetry throughout the world and has also had articles, written in Russian, published in Russia.She 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.