The Department of English and Creative Writing has selected Lauren Mills ’27 as the recipient of the third annual Project Green Light Award, a grant created by the Class of 1968 to support new works by undergraduate artists.
Mills, an English and creative writing major with a theater minor, will receive $5,000 to support the research and creation of a poetry chapbook inspired by the Appalachian region and its culture. She will also adapt the collection into a graphic novel.
“I am interested in writing a poetry collection that explores Appalachia’s history, culture, natural beauty, and the people who inhabit it, as well as the tensions that arise when personal identity collides with inherited place,” says Mills, who grew up in North Carolina, adjacent to the Appalachian Mountains. “The Southern Appalachian Mountains in particular, in addition to being one of the most biologically diverse places in North America, are home to a diverse set of people who are often at odds with the politics of the region.”
The project draws together several threads Mills has been developing in recent years, each pointing her toward the intersection of place, home, and translation. Last year, Mills worked closely with poet Mildred Barya through the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Gilbert-Chappell Mentors Series, which sparked her interest in writing about home. In her intermediate poetry class, taught by assistant professor Matthew Olzmann, Mills wrote her first full collection of poems.
And during her recent London Foreign Study Program, she created a 25-page graphic novel adapting the first section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for an English course taught by Andrew McCann, Henry Winkley Professor of English Language and Literature. Working through the challenge of translating Eliot’s sprawling, elusive poem into a cohesive sequence of images, she realized she had discovered a new way to read it.
“Translating the text into a cohesive narrative of images was a whole new kind of close reading, and I came out of the class with a deeper understanding of the poem than I ever could have imagined,” says Mills. “Since finishing that project, I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to use my own creative writing to make a graphic narrative; how approaching my own work as a kind of translator could generate new meaning as two stories are told at once in two different mediums.”
With support from the Project Green Light Award, Mills will immerse herself in the natural environment of the Appalachian Mountains. She spent spring break in Boone, N.C., where she visited museums and archives centered on the region, and in the summer, she will travel to the Great Smoky Mountains as she continues to research, write, and illustrate.
The Project Green Light Award has a limited run and rotates between arts departments each year. In 2024, Sascha Agenor ’25 received the inaugural award from the Department of Film and Media Studies to support the production of Munchiez, a 15-minute short film. In 2025, Helen Cui ’27 received the award from the Department of Studio Art to help bring to life Physicality and Hedonism, a four-piece, interactive installation.
“It was a difficult selection process, as the talent pool was very deep,” says Katie Crouch, senior lecturer and Mills’ project advisor. “Lauren’s project stood out because of the quality of the poetry, the rich topic of Appalachian culture, and the freshness of her illustrations. I believe the finished project will be extraordinary.”