First Major Gift During Thorp's Era Supports Creative Writing

Posted on July 1, 2008

The first major private gift made during the tenure of Holden Thorp ’86 as Carolina’s chancellor will enable creative writing students to study with some of the nation’s most notable writers.

The gift from Sallie Shuping-Russell ’77 of Chapel Hill was announced on July 1, the first day of Thorp’s administration. It is intended to fund an innovative new course featuring the work of active writers who will hold a distinguished visiting professorship within the creative writing program. The program is part of UNC’s department of English and comparative literature.

The $666,000 gift qualifies for a $334,000 grant from the N.C. Distinguished Professors Endowment Trust, bringing its total value to $1 million. The state fund, established in 1985 by the N.C. General Assembly, provides matching grants to recruit and retain outstanding faculty.

The gift will create the Sallie Shuping-Russell Distinguished Visiting Professorship. Starting in fall 2009, five to six outstanding writers will come to campus to participate in the regularly scheduled course, “Living Writers,” which will honor Shuping-Russell’s mother, Margaret R. Shuping ’44, who majored in journalism at UNC. The visiting professors also will give public readings for the University community.

Shuping-Russell, managing director at the investment firm BlackRock in New York, is a member of the UNC Board of Trustees, the UNC Foundation Investment Fund Co. board of directors and a former member of the board of directors of UNC Health Care. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and political science at Carolina and holds a master’s in business administration from Columbia University.

The “Living Writers” course will be the creative writing program’s first and only semester-length class arranged entirely around a series of visiting writers and their works, making it “a model for the study and practice of contemporary literature,” said Michael McFee ’76, director of creative writing at Carolina.

“This kind of close contact with authors, especially when students are familiar with their work, gives young writers the chance to have extended conversations with those practicing the art and craft to which they aspire,” McFee said.

Shuping-Russell’s gift builds on several other privately funded programs in creative writing at Carolina. These include the Thomas Wolfe Scholarship, the Blanche Britt Armfield Poetry Series, the Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program and the Doris Betts Distinguished Professorship.

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