In January, Professor Amy Lemmon, a poet and the acting assistant chair of English and Communication Studies, received a 2025 Franklin Research Grant. This highly competitive award, bestowed by the American Philosophical Society, is one of the few grants designed specifically to support scholarly research by helping recipients meet the cost of travel to libraries and archives they need to visit for their projects. Lemmon learned of this unique source of funding with the help of Professor Carli Spina, head of research and instructional services, Gladys Marcus Library. “Her support and guidance were very helpful to me in the process of applying for the Franklin grant,” Lemmon says.
Lemmon will be traveling to London in July to delve into the archives of the Langdon Down Centre for her project “Corresponding Care: Mary Crelling Langdon Down and the Development of Residential Services for the Intellectually Disabled.” “To stay in London is very expensive, and I need to be there for a month to really make a dent—there’s like 110 boxes!” she says, adding, “This is a new venture for me. My teaching and research at FIT is creative writing primarily. My publications are a creative world. This is an opportunity to tap into a more scholarly approach in an immersive way.”
Lemmon is the author of three poetry collections and a co-author of two chapbooks. She has taught at FIT since 1996 and joined her department full time in 2000. In the 2004–05 academic year, she received a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2015, she won the FIT Faculty Excellence Award.
Lemmon has received numerous honors outside of FIT, including a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conferences, the Elliston Poetry Prize, and the Ruth Cable Poetry Prize. In addition to her books of poetry—Fine Motor (2008), Saint Nobody (2009), and The Miracles (2019)—Lemmon has contributed to numerous literary journals; and her poem “I Take Your T-shirt to Bed Again” was included in The Best American Poetry anthology in 2013.