New UVA Poetry Prize Honors Memory of Acclaimed Alumna Writer

A new prize recognizing outstanding original poetry from undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing Program honors the memory of a talented young alumna who died as her literary career was blossoming.

The Courtney Kampa Poetry Prize was named in honor of the late 2010 graduate whose 2018 collection of poetry (Our Lady of Not Asking Why) was published to critical and popular acclaim. Kampa discovered her love of writing poetry as an undergraduate student at UVA, where she also met her future husband, Will Anderson, a singer and songwriter whose platinum-selling band Parachute was born during Anderson and Kampa’s undergrad years.

Anderson and his family founded the annual prize as a way to honor Kampa’s legacy as a poet and teacher who worked to help her students cultivate their own love and mastery of poetry.

Kampa died unexpectedly in 2022 at the age of 35.

“Courtney was always really curious. She loved learning, and she loved words. I think she came to UVA maybe with a different plan in mind, but that plan was completely transformed when she discovered poetry,” Anderson said. “Studying poetry in college set her down a path she envisioned going down the rest of her life, both as a poet and as an educator. I think UVA was the place where that really started, so we wanted to create something that reflected that.”

The inaugural Courtney Kampa Poetry Prize was awarded in May to Dana Sun, a double major in English and music who graduated this spring from the College of Arts & Sciences. Sun said she plans to save the $4,000 prize for her graduate school fund to pursue a Master of Fine Arts.

UVA English professor Lisa Russ Spaar recalled meeting Kampa in the spring of 2008 when she admitted Kampa to the department’s honors program for English majors interested in focusing their literary studies in poetry writing and poetics. The Poetry Concentration is traditionally small, and the faculty and students involved get to know themselves very well as writers, readers and people, Spaar said.

“In our midst, Courtney was a luminous presence: generous, insightful, and crazily talented.  You could say that poetry found Courtney at a time when she needed what it can inimitably offer—a chance to grapple with complex emotions, to make beauty, to plunder word/world connections—some of the same rewards that ballet can offer, a path that Courtney was on before an injury changed that trajectory for her,” Spaar said. I” will always be grateful to Courtney for the gracious force of love and light she brought to the world we shared.”

Kampa went on to pursue a career in poetry after earning her MFA from Columbia University and was awarded a prestigious Stegnor Fellowship at Stanford University where she wrote and studied for two years. She taught at The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and was a professor of undergraduate writing at Lipscomb University and Belmont University in Nashville.

To honor Kampa’s memory, Anderson wrote and recorded a solo album titled How Little Love Is/How Worth Everything that was released last year. The Tennessean newspaper described the album as “both a love letter and a farewell blending acoustic musings, orchestral ballads and funky pop songs” inspired by Kampa’s own eclectic musical tastes.

Anderson’s 10-city tour performing songs from the album and reading poems from A Bright and Borrowed Light, a posthumously published collection of Kampa’s work included a Nov. 11 Charlottesville performance last year at The Southern Café & Music Hall.

The homecoming concert drew a crowd of Anderson and Kampa’s friends from their UVA days.

“It was really a nice celebration of her,” Anderson said. “So many old friends came to town from Richmond, from D.C. and other places, as well as family members. The community really showed out. It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”