2021 Murfreesboro Laureates announced
The City of Murfreesboro Cultural Arts announced the 2021 recipients of the Murfreesboro laureate honor today. Dancer laureate Meg Brooker and Actor laureate Cameron L. Mitchell join Poet laureate Amie Whittemore after being selected from a talented pool of artists to represent the City of Murfreesboro.
The Murfreesboro Cultural Arts Laureate Program is a notable honor for local artists, providing recipients with further opportunities to educate, advocate, and represent the community through their own creative initiatives. Laureates serve for one year. Whittemore was selected as Poet laureate last year and was invited to serve through 2021.
In its fourth year, one change was made to the Cultural Arts laureate program, expanding the range of artists eligible to apply. The honorees were selected from a pool of applicants who applied in the performing arts and visual arts categories. Next year, the current Poet laureate category will be changed to Literary Arts laureate in an effort to include more artists.
About the Laureates
Dancer Laureate
Meg Brooker, Artistic Director of Duncan Dance South and Associate Professor and Director of Dance at Middle Tennessee State University, is an artist and scholar specializing in the early modern dance practices of Isadora Duncan and Florence Fleming Noyes. Meg has performed in national and international venues throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and Russia, and her work has been covered by publications including Dance Teacher Magazine, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Chattanooga’s The Pulse. In Tennessee, Meg has appeared at the Parthenon in Centennial Park and the Hunter Museum of American Art, as well as at MTSU’s Tucker Theatre, where she frequently creates work with MTSU dance majors. Meg holds an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Yale. www.duncandancesouth.org, www.mtsu.edu/dance
Actor Laureate
Cameron L. Mitchell is a Memphis native and graduate of Middle Tn State University. After studying in Japan, Cameron found a passion to engage the community as an actor and spoken word artist. When he is not mentoring poets for Southern Word, you can catch him acting in plays such as Ghost at The Nashville Children’s Theater. Cameron has presented at Conferences for Vanderbilt University, NAACP, & Creative Exchange to name a few. Many of his works are used to inspire the community, highlight mental health awareness, and spotlight conversations that we need to have as a society.
Returning Poet Laureate
Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), the 2020-
2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
Information about the laureate program and submitting for the 2022 laureate honor can be found at www.murfreesboroparks.com, or by contacting Deb Hunter, Murfreesboro Parks and Recreation, at (615) 801-2606, or dhunter@murfreesborotn.gov.
