Professor Spencer Everett Wins 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature

Photo: Annie Powers

By: Madeline Katz

Spencer Everett began writing poetry as a teenager. Looking back, he says, he soon realized that “at the end of the day I was stubborn and I followed that interest as far as I could.” His stubbornness seems to have paid off. The Fordham English Professor’s determination in developing a poetic and expansive view of the world led him through a myriad of creative pursuits including poet, art critic, writer, professor and most recently has earned him the distinction of a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature. 

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is a non-profit arts organization founded to support the art community. Through the NYSCA/NYFA fellowship, the organization awards unrestricted cash grants of $7,000 to artists working within fifteen different disciplines. The program operates on a triennial cycle, awarding fellowships to five disciplines per year. This year’s disciplines include Craft/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, and Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. Applicants are judged by discipline-specific peer panels in a rigorous process.

Everett is one of 3,536 artists who applied for the program this year. Grounded by his background in poetry and always up for a challenge, Everett is excited to further explore the intimate connection between his nonfiction writing and poetic practice. “I’ve been a poet for far longer and one of the things that drove me to write more nonfiction was the challenge of voicing my poetics in more explicit terms,” he says. If there’s one thing that Everett does well, it’s holding space for a lively critical discourse to interact with a deeply poetic approach to writing. “I think that my nonfiction practice definitely strengthens my poetry in part because I feel like the lines between what constitutes poetry and prose--I’m interested in blurring those boundaries,” he says. “To me, poetry has always been a nonfictional investigation of the real. So in a way they’re not a departure, they inform each other a lot.” For Everett, it is impossible to divorce poetics from prose. 

The nonfiction project Everett will be working on is an investigative foray into the poetics of information acting as both “a forensics report and a sci fi catalogue.” He says, “it's an open-ended diaristic project about reading and forgetting, and the oneness of everything forgotten and read. It's a lot about dead information.” The project will explore reading as a form of encounter of the literal text on the page as objects but also an encounter of the more personal moments that act as the daily markers of life. Readers can expect to meander through a collection of “grave markers, road kill, children's books, box fans, plastic scale models, Google image captions” and more as they delve deeper into this expansive project.  

Everett imagines that the book will include a mix of critically oriented prose with some pieces veering more towards the poetics of the project. At the moment his work lives on an expansive and ever growing Word document. “The platforms we use to write are endemic to the principles of our writing and so I’m making a huge Word document of various artifacts,” Everett says. The fluid nature of such a document enables him to add and edit his written artifacts in the same way that a museum curator would select pieces for an exhibit. That is in a way “that’s both careful but not precious.” Everett extended the same DIY attitude towards the careful curation of Resolving Host’s first series of chapbooks of poetry. As an editor, he championed “work that straddles the line between the art world and literature” while supporting underappreciated poetic voices. Although the project is currently on hiatus, the process of collecting and curating written artifacts will no doubt affect his new project. 

Having written art reviews and interviews for the likes of Whitehot Magazine and BOMB Magazine, Everett’s literary practices are influenced by his interest in visual arts. The inner art critic within him informs the immersive ways in which he considers the relationship between reader and text. “Even in prose, I’m interested in the literal way in which we encounter blocks of text, shapes of text,” says Everett. “It’s an engagement with black and white. It’s an engagement with boundaries and borders.” The text becomes an artifact in which the reader can interact with the ink of the text, the paper of the pages, and the book as an object.

Combining his background in the arts with his poetic roots, Everett is poised to blur the boundaries between poetry, art and nonfiction. “There’s an expansive meaning to what it is to be an artist and I think that can also be true for writing,” he says.