May 14, 2015
Poet’s First Book of Verse Wins Prize
NC State MFA alumna Noel Crook has achieved what felt like an unattainable dream: She is a poet, and a prize-winning one at that. Crook won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Award, a national prize providing up-and-coming poets with the opportunity to publish their first book. Crook, who earned her MFA in creative writing from NC State in 2008, gave her $2,500 prize money to NC State to support the MFA program, telling the university’s development office there wouldn’t be a book without John Balaban, the university’s emeritus poet-in-residence.