The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) is thrilled to announce that Professor Sean Frederick Forbes has been awarded the first UCHI/Mellon Faculty Fellowship

With support from UConn’s CLAS Dean’s Office, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of the Vice President for Research, and as part of the Mellon-supported Faculty of Color Working Group initiative, Forbes will be working on his current project, “Archaeological Revival: A Book of Poems.” This full-length book of poetry is written in the style of a “novel-in-many-verses,” a term Forbes has coined, as it maintains the narrative elements of a novel through the use of different poetic forms and styles. These poems question the role of a working-class raised, gay, mixed race scholar who is carving a path for himself in an academic setting that doesn’t readily accept his methodological approaches to issues of race, gender, and sexual identity in the 21st century. 

 

Sean Frederick Forbes is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut. His creative and critical work focuses on ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. Forbes’ publications include a book of poetry Providencia (2Leaf Press, 2013); and two co-edited anthologies of personal narratives What Does It Mean to Be White in America? Breaking the White Code of Silence: Personal Narratives by White Americans (2Leaf Press, 2016); The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century (2Leaf Press, 2017); as well as poems published in Poem-A-Day online, Crab Orchard Review, Sargasso, A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, and Midwest Quarterly. He received a Woodrow Wilson Mellon Mays University Fellows Travel and Research Grant for travel to Providencia, Colombia.