Allison Hutchcraft Honored as Teaching Award Finalist

Allison Hutchcraft of English is one of three nominees for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Award the Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Part-Time Faculty Member. The other nominees are Lawrence Blydenburgh of Criminal Justice and Criminology and Janna Shedd of Religious Studies.

Hutchcraft received her MFA in poetry from Purdue University and bachelor’s degree in English from Lewis & Clark College. Her poems have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals.

New poems from her sequence titled “So Legged and Footed,” which re-imagines the dodo bird, are forthcoming in Kenyon Review. She has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon and the Key West Literary Seminars in Florida as well as recognition in poetry contests from Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts and Third Coast literary magazine.

She is currently working on a book-length manuscript of poems. Hutchcraft has taught composition and creative writing at Purdue University and accelerated online writing courses with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. Since the fall of 2013, she has been an adjunct lecturer in the English Department at UNC Charlotte, where she teaches introductory, intermediate, and advanced creative writing courses in poetry and fiction. In each of her classes, she strives to construct for students an inspiring and supportive space where they can imaginatively, and with full attention, inhabit new ideas, voices, and forms in their writing.

Her students indicate she succeeds in this quest. One commented, “I took her Intro to Poetry class, which in itself was an art. Ms. Hutchcraft taught me so much about poetry by brining her own passion for the subject into the class. I was moved by her deep respect for my fellow students, and the amount of time and energy she put into helping each of us nurture our poems.”