The UofL English associate professor and creative writing program director is one of eight scholars chosen from ACC universities to participate in the festival’s “Bridging Chasms” conversations. Two accomplished professors from different studies – say, an author and a scientist – are paired for each exchange to explain essential elements and details from their fields in the hope of increasing understanding across disciplines.

The ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival also will include interactive installations from the conference’s 15 schools, including “The Sweet Way to Preserve Blood” and “Whiskey Webs” featuring UofL researchers. UofL theatre arts also will perform “The Mountaintop,” a fictional retelling of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night. The events are April 5-7 at the National Museum of American History.

For her part, Petrosino expects to discuss the rise in intensely personal viewpoints in contemporary poetry, with writers celebrating identity issues of race, class, gender and sexuality and incorporating their own history in their work. With that shift comes a “movement against the patriarchal gaze of traditional poetry,” she said. “What do you do with all the old stuff?”

Instead of pushing aside all the canonical works as problematic or no longer useful, she suggests that scholars need to “open up the work” and examine those standards and lesser-known pieces in different ways.

Petrosino, teaching in her ninth year at UofL and finishing up her fourth poetry volume, is venturing into the personal realm herself through the help of new national and statewide awards in her field. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a $25,000 creative writing fellowship this year, one of 35 in poetry. She is concluding her Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, one of its 16 $7,500 awards last year.

“It was really wonderful to be recognized as a Kentucky author through that grant,” she said.

She plans to use the resources to work on “White Blood,” due for 2020 publication by local literary press Sarabande Books, and a fifth, related volume.

“These two projects look at the legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South,” particularly in Virginia and Kentucky. Petrosino is conducting genealogical research into her own family’s Virginia history “to see what their lives were like before and after the Civil War.”

In reclaiming this heritage, Petrosino has been trying to piece together family oral history and records for enslaved and newly freed people, plus get a sense of her relatives’ environment.

“There’s something about standing in the physical spot where certain ancestors lived,” she said. “That’s important for a poet too.”

The poem “Europe,” her favorite from her third volume, “Witch Wife,” recently attracted national and local attention. U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith read and discussed it during her Feb. 18 poem-each-weekday podcast “The Slowdown,” produced in partnership with the Library of Congress and the Poetry Foundation. UofL President Neeli Bendapudi read from it during her March 5 Louisville public lecture about the liberal arts in a global economy.

Petrosino strongly believes in the liberal arts too and not just because she is a poet.

“No job I’ve ever had has been completely what it says on the job description,” she said. “If you are a person who can write well and communicate and solve problems and work with others….Even in the hard sciences, the narrative is very important.”

The state has a long history of celebrating the arts – from music to the storytelling tradition, from gastronomy to visual arts, she said. Various arts communities are collaborating and reaching out, as happened last year when Petrosino was invited to contribute a live spoken-word performance as part of the Louisville Ballet’s annual choreographers’ showcase. Louisville magazine recently asked her to write a poem reflecting on the fatal shootings at a Louisville grocery store.

“The creative economy of Kentucky and particularly Louisville has always been strong,” she said. “For there to be a creative writing program at the University of Louisville is just as it should be.”

Next year will be the 20th for the English department’s creative writing program to offer the Anne and William Axton Reading Series, which brings distinguished authors to Belknap Campus not only to share their work but also to lead free, public master classes to describe their creative process and to critique student work.

“The point of the Axton endowment is to bring students into interaction with the writers,” Petrosino said. “To have as much interaction is a unique thing.”

From Jan. 19-Feb. 24, the will display drawings by Grubola that emerged from his return to a 43-year practice of drawing weekly. The opening reception is 6 p.m. Jan. 19.

“When my 17-year tenure as chair ended in 2010, along with its administrative burdens, I was able to return to my first two loves: drawing human figures and teaching full time,” he said.

He began hiring a model for drawing in the Hite studios on Fridays, hence the exhibition title, “The Friday Sessions.”  

Grubola also spent decades drawing moving bodies and recently returned to drawing dancers at the Louisville Ballet’s Thursday rehearsals. These sessions formed his second new body of work, “The Thursday Sessions,” also on display at the Cressman.

In celebration of Grubola’s significant impact as a teacher, Hite Art Institute is also hosting an exhibition of work by Grubola’s many former students. “Selections from the teachings of James Grubola” is on display through Feb. 9 in .

Grubola’s show was recently featured in , which noted his distinguished teaching career. 

“For James Grubola, the most important metric is established by his students, so the crucial measure is in the achievements from thousands of people who earned their Bachelor’s degrees through UofL since 1975, when he joined the faculty. But the credentials and formal recognitions are certainly there:

• 2001 – “Red Apple Award” for excellence in teaching from UofL’s Alumni Association.
• 2008 –  the “Trustee’s Award,” one of the university’s highest awards which annually recognizes one faculty member who has had the greatest positive impact on students.
• 2015 – College of Arts and Sciences “Distinguished Faculty Award in Teaching.”

Under Grubola’s leadership as chair, Hite saw the introduction of the Mary Spencer Nay Scholarship Endowment, the addition of a program in glass housed in the Cressman Center, the university’s first, permanent, non-medical facility downtown, and the adoption of a selective admissions policy for the department. 

“Early in their careers, Grubola and his wife, artist and curator Kay Grubola, were artists-in-residence at the Christopher Ballet in Michigan, and when he was a graduate student at Indiana University he drew during ballet classes, so the interest in dance figures is nothing new, yet it is interesting that an artist who favors silverpoint and goldpoint as mediums should be focused so intently on the kineticism of choreographed movement,” wrote Artebella … “The kineticism is there, formed in vigorous line around the barely detectable dancers in motion – think of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character in full whirling dervish mode. The suggestion of animation seems entirely appropriate to the forceful way Grubola captures the grace and athleticism of dance with such immediacy. The artist has a deep and profound relationship to the world of ballet that is communicated with great clarity.”