Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, is working on her sixth collection of poetry, and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship is providing her the support to complete the project.
After a competitive and rigorous selection process, the $20,000 award will not only help Sharma finish the book Onement Won but also present the book once it is published.
Sharma’s forthcoming collection is based on abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman’s Onement series of paintings. Raised as a Hindu, she says she is “more secular now and moving away from organized religious structures. Some of the poems are about that, to think about onement when one is developing a way to find their own ground, their own wholeness, their own oneness.”
She also draws on her experience of being widowed twice in under 10 years. “A lot of the book is about finding my own journey into wholeness through thinking about art and poetry and caregiving and love and grief and friendship and race,” she says. “I write about gender too, being a woman and thinking about how we explore our wholeness.”
While the award supports forthcoming work, it is also a recognition of prior achievement.
Sharma says the NEA creative writing awards are distributed among people at different points in their careers. As a mid-career poet, Sharma says, “Many of us have several books. Many have been building an esthetic voice that might define our sense of poetics.”
The author of five poetry collections, most recently Grief Sequence in 2019, Sharma has also published Undergloom, Infamous Landscapes, The Opening Question (which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize) and Bliss to Fill. She received a Howard Foundation Award in 2010 and was a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize.
Sharma’s successes have translated to her teaching as well. In 2023, she received Pomona College’s Wig Distinguished Professor Award in recognition of exceptional teaching, concern for students, and service to the College and community.
“Prageeta has transformed my relationship with poetry over the course of college. I am indebted to her skill, criticism and passion for art,” wrote a student who nominated her.
At Pomona, Sharma teaches classes in poetry, film, interdisciplinary arts and creative writing.
This spring she took pleasure in teaching a beginning poetry workshop. “We get to celebrate really extraordinary books of poetry,” she says. “The students are participating in supporting the poetry community. They learn so much. We share in the love of language.”
With her students, Sharma often quotes Richard Hugo, the poet who founded the poetry program at the University of Montana, where she taught for 12 years: “He said, ‘The poetry workshop and the writing workshop in general is the space where your life matters.’”