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GREENSBORO — Jennifer Grotz once wrote poetry like a drunken Patsy Cline, sick on love.

She heard that from her professor at Tulane. It didn't stop her. She still wrote her honor's thesis of poetry — even though she had taken only one creative writing course — and told her professor: "I may not be any good but I work hard!''

Well, she has. Still does. And today, she's $25,000 richer and bound for France next spring, because she's considered one of America's most promising young female writers.

And it's all because of her poetry.

This Texan, who now teaches poetry at UNCG, can turn a phrase.

She writes about geography — from a Paris street to the spangled countryside of small-town Texas. She hauls in images of pickle juice, tomato plants and even the descriptive color alizarin crimson and marries them with words and phrases that bring to mind something Southern writer Flannery O'Connor once said about writing.

Learning to write is learning to see . And Grotz does see.

It's in the overheard words and phrases that fill her little black book. It's in her scribbled-down ideas, written in all kinds of colored ink, that fill her durable notebook, with the colorful postcard taped to the front. She goes through four notebooks a year.

And it's in her rented home in Greensboro's College Hill neighborhood . There, in the morning, for hours at a time in her second bedroom, she writes.

She may watch the squirrels out the window or count the number of beer cans in her neighbor's backyard. But there's no music, no grading papers. Nothing but silence, except for what she hears in her head.

It must work.

Last month, the Rona Jaffe Foundation — the country's only literary awards program dedicated to supporting female writers exclusively — named Grotz as one of six writers awarded a $25,000 fellowship.

Ask her about how the foundation found her and she'll blurt out over coffee, "Dude, I have no idea!'' You don't apply. You don't get nominated. Somehow, you get discovered. And Grotz found out she blipped on the foundation's radar screen through a letter that said simply: We know about you.

The Jaffe Foundation must've known about Grotz from "Cusp,'' her award-winning poetry book from 2003. Plus, she has the cred.

She's a 36-year-old poet who holds a doctorate in literature and creative writing, teaches at the country's second oldest creative-writing program and models herself after the late Randall Jarrell, UNCG's thoughtful poet and scholar.

Yet, look at her personal history. She told her professor from Tulane the truth.

She's an only daughter, the oldest of two children of an insurance salesman father and an artist mother. Almost every year she moved around Texas because of her dad's job. But wherever she went, she read. All the time.

She counts the first books she read as The Bible, the dictionary and the telephone book. She first thought she'd be a preacher because she wrote her own edition of the Bible — complete with pictures.

She wrote poetry in family cards and in her Big Chief tablet, with a big red cover, which she filled with child like insights such as, "I love bees. I love sunshine. I like to be outside.''

But as she got older, she burrowed deep into her local library. The more she read, the more she realized poetry was the fusion of thinking and feeling, more accessible than philosophy, nearly as spiritual as a prayer.

With the $25,000 fellowship, Grotz now can buy time she needs — away from grading papers and counting beer cans. She'll write her second book of poetry next spring in the south of France.

During that time, I'll bet she'll remember her time in the Lotos Club , one of the country's oldest literary clubs.

It was last month in New York City. She stood near the bust of poet Robert Frost, surrounded by dark-wood paneling in a place that lists Mark Twain as one of its earliest members. She heard award-winning writer Joan Silber tell her and the other Jaffe winners, "Writers have to hoard the joy of times like this.''

And yes, she will.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jrowe@news-record.com.