2023 Larry Morris Scholarship Award recipients

This year we were able to award a full prize scholarship of $2,500 and a 2nd place prize scholarship of $1,250 to two outstanding UNM graduate students to support their research and writing.2023 Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship

KENNIA LOPEZ is a 3rd year student in UNM’s PhD. program in Rhetoric and Writing, now in the early phases of a dissertation, and in addition, is undertaking a parallel creative project in poetry. In 2020, Kennia completed a MFA from Brooklyn College and produced an initial creative volume of poetry: The Exodus (published in June of 2022 with Tolsun Books). Kennia’s dissertation and a new poetry collection will serve as an extension of the work that began with The Exodus. As Kennia’s application stated: " The Exodus is a response and a call to action and uses the King James Bible to make sense of the experiences of the immigrant as well as the first generation child. The title is a nod to the mass exodus of the Israelites in the biblical book, Exodus and uses the analogy of "God's people" to denote the inherent value and worth of undocumented peoples. The immigration and years lost in the desert are also used as a metaphor to explain the literal journeys of immigrants across borders (the horizontal migration) as well as the spiritual journeys made across the soul (the vertical migration)."

Kennia's upcoming project is an experiment in poetic conversations with the Godhead, intended as therapeutic exercises in questioning "the voice" (God, or nature, or Creator) which includes catharsis, healing, and worship in the process, along with the pain of colonization and immigration. The dissertation project aims toward a pedagogy of poetry in the first-year composition classroom that includes poetry, journalistic endeavors, and this same spiritual questioning process, advocating for the composition classroom as a place for catharsis, empathy, decolonization, and agency building. The dissertation will be cross-disciplinary, bridging gaps between creative and rhetoric/composition; the poetry created for this 2023 Scholarship project will also be presented in the dissertation.

For Kennia, asking questions is a necessary step in strengthening spiritual belief and "contending with the harm and violence of the past is needed to be a conscientious 21st century believer even if it is uncomfortable."  Kennia is awarded this year's $2,500 scholarship for the potential the poetry volume holds, not only for contemporary spiritual poetry, but also for its potential to impact concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality, through new forms of prayer, reconciliation and communion, now re-envisioned as poetic inquiry and poetic conversation "with the Godhead". We recognize forging a path of personal, generational, and cultural healing through new forms of creative practice as a poet, a scholar and a teacher, demands both spiritual courage and vision.  In addition, this project points to new understanding of the individual, interior process of decolonization, as well as evolving collective concepts and practices of both poetry and spirituality in a time of increasing global migration and immigration in the 21st Century. We are pleased to be able to contribute this funding to Kennia’s work.

CYRUS STUVLAND is a third-year MFA student in Creative Nonfiction at UNM, about three quarters of the way through writing a dissertation entitled, "The Museum of Clean", a book length memoir about growing up home schooled in a fundamentalist Christian household in northern Idaho. Cyrus is currently the Creative Nonfiction Editor of UNM's Blue Mesa Review 
literary magazine, has published stories and articles in well known literary journals, and been awarded prestigious writing residencies. "The Museum of Clean" explores equity in gender and sexual identity, including the Cyrus’s own transitioning between genders, through a hybrid memoir form that includes personal narrative, lyric meditation and literary journalism. The work includes the struggles to be spiritual, to find love, to be in right relationships with people, place, and community in the painful face of family and religious teachings that label LGBT+ individuals and their communities as sinful or worse. The quest leads to deepening insight through time spent in nature discovering personal relationship with place: woods and mountains in the wild, where a new depth of the sacred waits. In the forest, Cyrus explores a growing understanding that opens to previously unknown possibilities that includes generational elders who have shared the same struggles, ultimately leading to new family and belonging.

Cyrus is awarded this year's $1,250 scholarship to support completion of this creative dissertation. Cyrus' story is reflective of a dawning time of new and more open possibilities of identity, gender, community and faith, and the need for strength to deal with subsequent social and religious backlash. We feel the book holds potential for deepening spiritual understanding, as well as offering support to those who struggle in the LGBT+ community. Beyond the frame of LGBT+ and gender fluidity, this story is about the price of coming into one's own sense of self as a unique individual, a price that inevitably requires a reckoning with powerful expectations of social norms that cannot be fulfilled, impossible cultural demands, and conflicting religious teachings that only confuse and frustrate the inner longing. This dissertation points the way to both new and re-envisioned ancient practices for 21st spirituality in a universal sense as well, through healing time spent in nature, recovery of the sacred, contemplation of place and home, and Cyrus' further pursuit and fulfillment through community. We are pleased to contribute this funding.