2011-2012 IAA Fellows
The IAA Faculty Fellows program provides UNT (Denton campus) Faculty Fellows with 100% reassignment for one semester to accomplish and present creative research projects. Participants are selected through an annual application process open to all UNT (Denton campus) full time faculty in the visual, performing and creative literary arts. The list of current and emeritus IAA fellows offers examples of projects completed or underway through this initiative. Fellow’s activities often involve collaborations with outside artist and entities, resulting in creative works or initiatives that garner national attention and further raise the profile of the arts at UNT.
Mark Ford, coordinator of percussion at the University of North Texas, and Corey Marks, associate professor of English at UNT, have been named the two faculty fellows in the university’s Institute for the Advancement of the Arts in the 2011-12 academic year.
Ford plans to compose a concerto for wind ensemble and percussion soloist, and Marks will focus on writing a book of poetry during the faculty fellowship program, which grants faculty members release from other faculty duties to concentrate on their creative endeavors full time for a semester.
Mark Ford
The percussion concerto that Ford composes will be performed and recorded by the UNT Wind Symphony under the direction of Eugene Migliaro Corporon. Ford also plans to create a version of the concerto for orchestra, and Innovative Percussion Inc. has agreed to publish his composition.
During his faculty fellowship, he will expand his composition skills by studying with internationally known composer Edward Gregson, recently retired from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and Jack Stamp, Wind Ensemble director and composer at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
“I am honored to be a recipient of the fellowship program,” Ford said. “This opportunity will allow me to work with world-class composers as I develop my own compositional skills. Additionally this fellowship program gives focus to UNT's outstanding support of the arts that creates new avenues of expression for faculty members.”
Ford, a marimba specialist, has performed throughout the United States and in Asia, Australia, Europe and South America. He has composed works for solo marimba and chamber music, which are considered standard in percussion literature and performed around the world. Ford is also the author of Marimba: Technique Through Music, a four-mallet marimba method book published by Innovative Percussion, Inc.
http://www.youtube.com/user/untperc
http://music.unt.edu/percussion/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Ford/178552935510396
Corey Marks
Marks will use the fellowship to work on his third manuscript of poetry. Specifically, Marks will concentrate on writing a sequence of six poems that will explore the theme of the modern zoo and “how zoos embody a complicated set of impulses: intellectual curiosity, preservation, entertainment, titillation, the performance of power,” he wrote in the fellowship application.
He also proposes to write a central poem about Dallas real-estate mogul Harlan Crow’s collection of sculptures of 20th-century dictators.
"I'm not writing stand-alone poems, but a group of related poems that rely on a larger structure to hold them together,” he said. “The fellowship will allow me time to work on that larger-scale work -- to write and to craft a sequence, to do the research that I think will be important to these poems, to get lost in the ideas I am playing with and see what I come out with on the other end.”
Marks’ first book, Renunciation, was a National Poetry Series selection. His second book, The Radio Tree, won the 2011 Green Rose Prize and is forthcoming form New Issues Press in April 2012. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including in New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in the anthology Legitimate Dangers. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review.
http://www.nea.gov/features/writers/writersCMS/writer.php?id=03_11
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marks_f10.html
http://www.versedaily.org/2011/thestring.shtml
http://newissuespress.blogspot.com/2011/01/winner-of-2011-green-rose-prize.html