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YSU professor wins Arts Education Award
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
He’s a writer, a poet, a teacher, an editor, a musician.
Phil Brady, a Youngstown State University English professor since 1990, is this year’s recipient of the Arts Eduction Award, which is one of the Governor’s Awards for the Arts in Ohio.
Elsa Higby, Brady’s wife and the director of Grow Youngstown, nominated him for the honor.
“Arts education takes place in private, personal places,” said Brady, who lives on the city’s North Side.
It doesn’t get much outside attention. The award provides an opportunity for people to learn about the art and artists in the community, he said.
The Arts Education Award is presented to an “individual or organization that has made significant contributions through leadership and creativity to advance arts education in Ohio’s schools and community organizations,” according to the Ohio Arts Council.
Brady will receive the award at a May 13 luncheon in Columbus attended by art supporters and enthusiasts and members of the Legislature and state government.
Brady, a Queens, N.Y., native, founded the YSU Poetry Center; is one of the founders of Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, a joint program among YSU, the University of Akron and Kent State and Cleveland State universities; and founded Etruscan Press, a national literary press that he directs.
Brady also works with YSU’s outreach program, which provides education to inmates at Trumbull Correctional Institution, Trumbull County Camp and Northeast Reintegration Center in Cleveland.
He’s the author of six books. The most recent, to be released next month, “To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life before the Alphabet,” is a memoir in verse.
Brady also wrote three poetry collections, an essay collection and a memoir and edited “Poems and Their Making” and co-edited “Critical Essays on Joyce’s Portrait.”
“Poems and Their Making” is a collection of poems and descriptions by those poets of the development of those works.
It’s a sort of tribute to John Wheatcroft, Brady’s first poetry professor, and the inspiration for his career. Wheatcroft helped students recognize poetry as a human endeavor rather than from some other source.
Brady’s poems have appeared in more than 50 journals in the U.S. and Ireland.
“The difficulty comes in choosing which of his many contributions to arts education in Ohio to feature,” Higby wrote to the Ohio Arts Council in her nomination of Brady.
Brady believes he always knew he wanted to write, although he may not have called it that. He grew up attending Catholic Masses delivered in Latin by priests and listening to Irish music played by his parents.
That opened his imagination.
Brady also sings and plays the bodhran (a type of drum) and tin whistle as the frontman for Brady’s Leap, a group of YSU professors and musicians who perform Celtic music.
He became an educator as a way to mentor others, as professors mentored him.
Governor’s Awards also will be presented at the luncheon for Individual Artist, Business Support of the Arts, Arts Patron, Arts Administration and Community Development and Participation.
Other past Youngstown recipients of Governor’s Awards include Louis Zona, Clyde Singer, John Weed Powers, Dr. John J. McDonough and Joseph G. Butler III.