Lauren Slaughter, assistant professor of English in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences, recently received a writing award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She is one of six emerging women writers honored for excellence in their craft and will receive a $30,000 award.
The program — the only national literary awards program of its kind devoted exclusively to women — was created by the late celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe to identify and support women writers of unusual talent and promise in the early stages of their writing careers. Awards of more than $1 million have been given to writers of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction since 1995.
Slaughter, a poet, is working on her first collection of poems, A Lesson in Smallness. She will also begin a new series of poems responding to the tornadoes that struck her home state of Alabama last year. Her works have appeared in several publications, including Blackbird, Chariton Review and Hunger Mountain. She also has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center.
Slaughter joins fellow honorees Julia Elliott, Christina Nichol, Rachel Swearingen, Kim Tingley and Inara Verzemnieks.