PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Carolyn (C.D.) Wright, professor of literary arts, and Charles Larmore, professor of philosophy, are the inaugural recipients of the Brown University Presidential Faculty Award. Brown President Christina Paxson announced the awards at the April faculty meeting Tuesday afternoon.

The Presidential Faculty Award recognizes members of the faculty who are conducting especially important and innovative scholarship and creates an opportunity for recipients to present their work to colleagues in other disciplines. Beginning in 2013-14, the award will be presented each semester. The recipient will give a lecture on his or her research to the Brown community, and will receive a research stipend of $5,000.

Members of the Brown faculty submitted nominations to the selection committee: B. Anthony Bogues, Erik Ehn, David Kertzer, Diane Lipscombe, and Jill Pipher.

Wright will serve as the recipient of the Presidential Faculty Award for the fall semester 2013. An M.F.A. graduate of the University of Arkansas, Wright won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in March 2011 for her most recent title, One With Others: [a little book of her days], which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. She also received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published more than a dozen books, including Rising, Falling, Hovering (2009), Like Something Flying Backwards (2007), and a text edition of One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), focused on Louisiana inmates. With photographer Deborah Luster, Wright won the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for One Big Self from the Center for documentary Studies at Duke University. She has published several book-length poems including Deepstep Come Shining (1998) and Just Whistle (1994). Wright has composed and published two state literary maps, one for Arkansas and one for Rhode Island, her adopted state. She has served as Rhode Island’s state poet and, with writer Forrest Gander, edited Lost Roads Publishers, an independent literary press, for more than 20 years. Other honors include awards from the Wallace Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts as well as the Lannan Literary Award. In 2004, Wright was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2005 she received the Robert Creeley Award. Rising, Falling, Hovering won the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2009. In 2012 she and Walter Feldman, professor emeritus of visual art, published an accordian book titled Breathtaken, concerning homicides in Orleans Parish.

Larmore will serve as the recipient of the Presidential Faculty Award for the spring semester 2014. Larmore earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He joined the Brown faculty in 2006 as the W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities.

Larmore’s work in moral and political philosophy has examined the foundations of political liberalism, the nature of the self, and the nature of moral judgment. He has also published extensively on figures and problems in the history of philosophy, particularly in 17th-century philosophy and German idealism. Larmore is the author of a number of books: Patterns of Moral Complexity (1987), Modernité et morale (1993), The Romantic Legacy (1996), The Morals of Modernity (1996); Les Pratiques du moi (2004), which was awarded the Grand Prix de Philosophie by the Académie Française; Débat sur l'éthique (2004), co-authored with Alain Renaut; The Autonomy of Morality (2008); Dare ragioni (2008); and Dernières nouvelles du moi (2009), co-authored with Vincent Descombes. His most recent book, Vernunft und Subjektivität (2012), is on the nature of reason. Larmore is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.