The Ford School’s Writing Center lecturers and instructors help students with everything from memo writing to cover letters, but their talents don’t end there. They are also successful writers themselves. Recently David Morse, lecturer in expository writing, and Molly Spencer, writing instructor, were each recognized for their work.
David was awarded a fellowship at U-M’s Institute for Humanities eight-week summer program. He, along with his cohort, formed an intellectual community as he pursued original research and participated in regular, cross-disciplinary fellows’ seminars. David’s fellowship supported his work on a novel.
Molly recently received prizes for her poetry. The first for the collection If the house won the Brittingham Prize, judged by Carl Phillips. “The eponymous house of If the house is at once literal and figurative. There’s the impulse toward an idea of domesticity that begins here with finding a house within which to shape a life, or try to. . . . Memory, too, is a house here—and in these poems, to make of memory a home becomes an act just as brave and honest—and all the lovelier for both—as the poems themselves,” Phillips said of the work. It will be published by University of Wisconsin Press this fall.
Molly’s poetry manuscript Relic and the Plum won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry, judged by Allison Joseph. It will be released in the fall of 2020.
Congratulations, David and Molly!
David Morse is a lecturer at the Ford School, where he teaches expository writing and an undergraduate course on utopianism. Before completing a master's degree in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, he edited for an educational nonprofit organization in Washington, DC, and taught English as a second language in Iwakuni, Japan. His fiction has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as magazines such as One Story, The Missouri Review, and Short Fiction. His play, Quartet, was performed in collaboration with the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.
Molly Spencer is a lecturer in expository writing at the Ford School. A poet, editor, and literary critic, she has taught writing to students of all ages, and her poetry and criticism have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and other literary journals. Prior to her writing career, Spencer earned a Master of Public Administration, and worked in large–scale public sector project management and legislative relations. She holds a BA in economics from the University of Notre Dame, a Master of Public Administration from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop.