Coastal Carolina University professor/poet Dan Albergotti is the recipient of a 2008-2009 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the South Carolina Arts Commission. He is one of six South Carolina artists - four writers and two musicians - to be selected for this annual fellowship recognizing superior artistic merit.

The six artist fellows receive $5,000 each.

Albergotti, assistant professor of English and the Department of English's coordinator of creative writing, joined the Coastal Carolina University faculty in 2005. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Clemson University in 1986 and 1988, respectively, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 1995.

He is the 2007 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize winner for his first collection of poems, "The Boatloads." His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. His chapbook, "Charon's Manifest," won the 2005 Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Chapbook Competition.

He has been a scholar at the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers' conferences and a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, he currently serves as poetry editor of storySouth (www.storysouth.com).

The board grants fellowships based on recommendations made by out-of-state review panelists who select fellows based solely on their work.