CSUN Professor Wins NEA Writing Grant

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded a Cal State Northridge English professor one of 40 coveted fellowships for creative writing.

Dorothy Barresi, 39, of Canoga Park said she intends to spend the $20,000 prize by taking the 1998-99 academic year off to complete a book of poetry, tentatively titled “Neither Moss Nor Rust.”

The dominant theme of her book is life and death. With the death of her mother in June 1994 and the birth of her son less than two months later, Barresi said she didn’t have a choice.

“It’s just what’s pressing on me emotionally,” she said. “My fondest wish was to have that baby born before she died.”

But she ran out of time. Barresi told her mother she was having a boy and that she’d name him Dante.

“I’m a mother now and I don’t have a mother,” Barresi said. “I have so much stuff to ask her about mothering but she’s not around now.”

The professor said she’s competed for the fellowship each year for the past 11 years. She called this year’s win “very gratifying.”

Barresi has taught creative writing, poetry and literature at CSUN for nine years and has published two books of poetry, “Post Rapture Diner” in 1996 and “All of the Above” in 1991.

The NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowship is the only openly competitive grant category for artists. In 1996, Congress slashed funding for the NEA, eliminating money used to fund the fellowships, said Virginia Cohen, an NEA spokeswoman.

Poets nationwide competed for the award, and 737 people applied, Cohen said. Those eligible had to have published poetry in the last six years.