Michael Potts is Two-time Winner
in Mary Belle Campbell and Rose Post Competitions

2006 Competition Winner

In what may be a first-time event for the Writers’ Network, one writer won two competitions in different genres the same 24-hour period. Poet/essayist Michael Potts of Linden, NC, is the winner of the 2006 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award for his collection of poems, From Field to Thicket, and the 2006 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award for his touching personal essay, "Haunted."

Potts, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Methodist College, was nominated for the Mary Belle Campbell Award by colleague Robin Greene, herself a winner of the Harperprints Chapook Award (then separate from the Randall Jarrell competition) for Memories of Light in 1991. His book was selected from five nominated chapbooks by judge Jim Clark, Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Barton College. Clark wrote of Potts’s book, "Mortality haunts these poems of love, family, friendship and betrayal! Well-crafted with a casual but elegant formality, they set the scalpel to our conflicted humanity, asking the big questions that don’t always have comforting answers."

The 2006 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Prize judge, distinguished nonfiction writer and poet Diana Hume George (currently the McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College), selected Potts’s essay, "Haunted," from six finalists sent to her by preliminary judge Ann Wicker of Charlotte. George awarded second place to "Visiting the Dead" by Courtney Cleary Doi of Durham, and third place to "Homeless, Stranded, Need Help" by Michael B. Owen of Chapel Hill. The winners will receive $300, $200, and $100 respectively.

George praised the work of the three winners, especially that of Michael Potts. Of him she says, "This writer has the gift of an emotional clarity that I find rare. He’s fearless about his fears, and he knows how to translate them in words that do not evade or deny. The result is disarming, both scary and sweet."