Since it was first established in 1988, the Blanche B. Armfield Poetry Fund has supported numerous poets-in-residence, poetry festivals and readings, lecture series, student and faculty awards and grants to those working in poetry. This includes the Blanche Armfield Poetry Series, which has brought more than 30 prominent American poets to campus for readings since 1989.
Anna Faison ’15, an American studies major and creative writing and education double minor from Aiken, S.C., received the Armfield Poetry Prize in 2014. The award is made annually to a junior poetry student in the Creative Writing program.
“The Blanche B. Armfield Prize validated the work that I do as a writer,” Anna said. “I can’t put a price on that. Second, this award gave me more time to focus on what I love—poetry! An award like this gave me the confidence to limit my work hours and focus instead on my schoolwork, my writing and my extracurricular work as a writing coach in local schools. The Blanche B. Armfield Prize gave me the extra financial and mental boost I needed to travel the country by train, writing about my experiences and gathering material for my senior honors thesis in poetry. I can’t say enough thanks for the financial peace of mind and the artistic confidence that this award has given me.”
Blanche B. Armfield
The following article was written by Jim Magaw ‘89 and appeared in the spring 2002 issue of Carolina Connections.
Blanche Armfield lived as a woman of letters in every sense.
“She had an abiding passion for words and literature, and she was a prolific writer of letters, history and poetry,” said her great-niece, Ponza Vaughan of Camden, S.C.
When she died in the summer of 2000, Ms. Armfield left an impressive legacy of learning, teaching and writing – and a bequest of $532,000 to the College of Arts and Sciences. The bequest adds to the endowment Armfield established in 1988 to “support and enhance an interest in poetry and to encourage the writing of poetry” among students and faculty at Carolina.
Born in Monroe in 1906, and raised in Concord, Armfield was one of five children of attorney Frank Armfield and his wife, Lucille.
Blanche Armfield came by her love for poetry honestly. As a young woman, her mother published a small book of poems, Songs from the Carolina Hills.
Armfield graduated from the North Carolina College for Women in Greensboro (now UNC-Greensboro) and earned her M.A. in English from UNC in 1928. Her first teaching position was at Princeton High School in eastern North Carolina. She later took coursework toward a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and studied under Sir William Craigie, an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Armfield became a Civil Service Commission employee in the 1930s. During World War II she worked for the Foreign Economic Agency, a war agency charged with keeping strategic materials out of the hands of the enemy. Following the war, she became an historian with the Army Medical Department, and wrote a history of the Medical Department of the Army during World War II.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Armfield was an English instructor at the Turkish Air Force Language School in Izmer, Turkey. She taught English at the Institute of Modern Languages in Washington, D.C., and gave private lessons in English to diplomatic personnel and many others in the northern Virginia area. Much of her work in later life was as a teacher of English as a second language in paid positions and as a volunteer.
Armfield lived modestly but was a firm believer in supporting and championing those causes closest to her heart. During her lifetime, she gave more than $50,000 to Carolina’s department of English, in addition to her bequest.
“This bequest is a wonderful boon to our creative writing program, and we are delighted,” said James Thompson, professor and chair of the department of English. “With the Armfield Fund, we will be able to bring in distinguished poets for public readings and workshops.” The fund has already allowed the department to bring some of the country’s finest poets to read their work and interact with students and faculty.
Poets taking part in the annual Armfield Poetry Reading have included Andrew Hudgins, Charles Wright, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Rodney Jones, Erica Funkhouser, Kate Daniels and Ronald Wallace. The Blanche B. Armfield Poetry Fund also supports student awards for poetry and may be used for graduate student fellowships and an undergraduate scholarship in poetry.
Although Armfield wrote poetry for many years, she chose not to make her work public until very late in her life. A long and closely held dream of hers was made real when a volume of her poetry was published shortly before her death.
Armfield kept her poems and other writings stored in a box that was placed in Ponza Vaughan’s trust when her great-aunt became ill. “No one in the family had any idea that she was such a prolific fiction writer and poet until she decided at the age of 92 that she wanted to see her work published.”
While she may have been a late bloomer as a published author, Armfield’s passion for poetry and her generosity of spirit resulted in a wonderful and timely gift that will enhance the educational experience of many generations of students and faculty at Carolina.
Blanche Armfield serves as an excellent example of a member of the Carolina community who was committed to pursuing and sustaining her passions. Those passions were revealed most clearly through her poetry, as in this passage from her poem, “A Moment’s Rapture.”
The night was made for silence:
Though filled with winged words,
Her heart is caught with moonlight
And rapture of hushed birds.
