Three Rivers Community College is excited to share that Associate Professor Frederick-Douglass Knowles II has received the Connecticut Office of The Arts: Artist Fellowship for Artistic Excellence Award in Poetry.

The Artist Fellowship Awards are granted by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, the state agency charged with fostering the health of Connecticut’s creative economy. The Artist Fellowship program recognizes the creative excellence of individual Connecticut artists in a variety of disciplines and allows them the opportunity to pursue new works of art and to achieve specific creative and career goals. This year, the program awarded fifty-one artists as recipients of the FY2020 Artist Fellowship Program.

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II (pictured) was honored to receive the Connecticut Office of The Arts: Artist Fellowship for Artistic Excellence Award in Poetry and plans to use the award to complete his current manuscript, Mentors

Three Rivers President Mary Ellen Jukoski congratulated Knowles on receiving the award, saying, “This is a wonderful honor for Professor Knowles. We take pride in his positive achievement and wish him continued success on this auspicious occasion.”

Of his accomplishment, Knowles says, “It is an esteemed honor to be recognized by the Connecticut Office of the Arts for an Artist Excellence Award in Poetry/Creative Non-Fiction. The Artist Fellowship will assist me accessing pivotal resources, such as writing residencies and retreats, in efforts to complete my current manuscript, Mentors, a collection of elegies honoring my ancestral and communal roots in Connecticut.”

Knowles is an Associate Professor of English who has taught at Three Rivers for 12 years in the English and Communications Department. He also teaches classes at a local prison as part of the Three Rivers Community College Second Chance Pell Grant program. In addition to serving as the Three Rivers representative on CSCU’s Students First Consolidation Committee, he co-founded the Men Against Domestic Violence Artistic Expression annual event which consists of music, poetry readings and performances, and a live artist painting. Knowles also chairs the TRCC Community Involvement Committee. In 2018, he was named Hartford’s first Poet Laureate.