2024 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 $1,000 to two outstanding UNM graduate students to support their research and writing.

Anthony Yarbrough is in the third year of his MFA at the University of New Mexico, where he is studying creative writing with a concentration in Fiction. Described by faculty as "a talented prose stylist, tireless worker, supportive classmate, and a dedicated, caring, and enthusiastic teacher", he is current editor-in-chief pf Blue Mesa Review, UNM's graduate literary magazine and previously served as Fiction Editor. In 2022, he received the Hillerman-McGarrity Scholarship in Creative Writing. Anthony's creative writing talent has unfolded from an initial confusing, conservative religious background in childhood, to adolescent struggles with cultural identity and authenticity, to a place of discovery and self acceptance where he now identifies as queer. This year's Scholarship will support his expenses for a novel-length project--dual coming of age story of two men, their relationship, and their diverging paths. In his words, this year's scholarship will be used for "the creation of narrative art in which others might find beauty, catharsis, and restoration of agency akin to spiritual awakening. "

Anthony's early religious upbringing led him to explore possibilities of a personal relationship with a different understanding of God. His search led him to study eastern religions and philosophy. In his words, "I absorbed some of their teachings and attitudes into my personal belief system, which finds expression in my writing. Some of my high school friends studied the Tarot, and the readings they gave me cracked my relationship with the world wide open. I began observing my environment more closely, studying it for the quiet ways in which the world was speaking to me." He explored other mystical and spiritual writers that influenced his work, perceiving and developing characters that "go through spiritual or mystical experiences that are coded in a more recognizable (day-to-day) experience....The fundamental laws of the universe that they relied on no longer hold true, and the characters must dig deeper, into the hidden connections between themselves, nature, and the higher powers that govern it, to survive." His project "is a sincere, impassioned investigation of trauma and the restoration of agency that can come only when you recognize and surrender yourself to a greater power (one that is not necessarily Judeo-Christian in nature). They must use the best tools they have—their bodies, intellects, and intuition—to contend with and understand the world. Depending on your willingness to engage the ugliness and beauty and softness inside you, the spiritual world can break you or heal you; in either case, you will be transformed. Transformation, to me, is what spiritual and mystical literature is all about. This is the higher goal of my project."

Anthony is awarded this year's Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship of $2500 to support completion of his book. We recognize the potential significance his book, not only for contemporary queer literature, but also for shaping concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality. The project holds the possibility of defining new forms of spiritual grounding--in the face of trauma and human betrayal--in a spirituality that is both inclusive and diverse--a spirituality that springs from individual inner promptings, as well as "hidden connections" between each other, an evolving natural world, and our Source, all potentially crucial ideas as the 21st century unfolds.  We recognize that it takes spiritual courage and vision for a writer to forge a path of personal and cultural healing through new forms of creative and spiritual insight.  We are pleased to be able to contribute this funding to his work.

Gwyneth Henke is a second-year candidate in the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at UNM. Gwyneth graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in religious studies. Her undergraduate senior honors thesis was a 100-page investigation into 20th-century monk and writer Thomas Merton. In 2020, she received the Huston Smith Award for Academic Excellence in Religious Studies. Prior to entering graduate school, she worked as the Executive Administrator of the Interfaith Partnership of Greater St. Louis, a non-profit seeking to promote dialogue between religious groups. In her words, her proposed project "straddles the boundaries of academic analysis and personal memoir, engaging with high-level historical and theological concepts even as it dwells in the region of memory, personal history, and psychology." She is working on an extended nonfiction piece exploring the history of anorexia mirabilis, the widespread phenomenon of religious women in medieval Europe who practiced extreme self-starvation and self-mutilation as a form of mystical communion with Christ. This work will include exploration of contemporary accounts of these saints, written by themselves and their confessors and peers, as well as current scholarship on them from academics. Themes include the "mystical marriages" experienced by many fasting saints, the relationship to the host, consumption of non-food (scabs, dirt, etc.), public perception, the relationship to pain, and the sanctification of hunger. Alongside this academic work is a lyrical exploration of her own experiences with anorexia nervosa, "re-imagining the all-female space of residential treatment facilities as a kind of modern convent, a space where women are navigating questions of pain, self-harm, penitence, suffering, mysticism, and purpose through daily negotiations with their bodies and food. In doing so, I will challenge scholarship that demarcates anorexia nervosa and anorexia mirabilis, interrogating the potentially misogynistic assumptions that underlie such divisions. How might we understand modern anorexia nervosa as a form of mysticism, I ask? And what are the dangers and possibilities of such reimagining?"


Gwyneth is awarded a 2nd place, 2024 Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship award of $1,000 in support of this complex and original project that holds the potential to impact concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality through new understanding of historic spiritual practices.  In addition, her project could potentially impact psychiatric and medical treatment of anorexia, by questioning and re-framing current psychiatric concepts in light of medieval mystical practices, particularly with regard to current assumptions of both cause and treatment models for anorexia in women. Her research and writing could possibly contribute to new models of spiritual practice involving the care of, the physical body beyond either current medical models or medieval practice to a synthesis that we are as yet unable to grasp.  We recognize her spiritual courage and vision as a scholar and writer in integrating this path of research, personal revelation, and spiritual insight. We are pleased to be able to contribute this funding to her work.