Connie Amoroso is passionate about words. As a little girl, she would read anything she could reach; and now, as a creative writing senior, she is a prolific poet and the latest recipient of the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Scholarship.

Last Wednesday, Amoroso was recognized in an intimate ceremony in the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center in Baker Hall. Though Amoroso officially received the award last November, the reception was a chance for her instructors and fellow students to formally honor her.

Following a reading from her critically acclaimed book, Inventing Victor, Pittsburgh resident and Carnegie Mellon alumna Jennifer Bannan (creative writing, ’91) introduced Amoroso to attendees.

“I am honored to recognize a student who I’m sure will go really far,” Bannan said, passing the torch from one successful writer to another.

Sharon Dilworth, an associate professor of English and creative writing, also spoke, presenting Amoroso’s biography and citing her involvement and achievement in the creative writing department.

Amoroso, a Pittsburgh native, was a member of her high school newspaper and submitted her application to Carnegie Mellon online, just 20 minutes before the deadline. When, to her surprise, she was accepted, Amoroso found her home in the University’s creative writing department.

Since then she has flourished; she now coordinates much of the department’s Adamson series, a year-long program of guest lecturers, assists English professor Gerald Costanzo with the Carnegie Mellon University Press, and is currently working on her senior honors thesis — all this while working part-time at a local pizza place.

Amoroso is only the second recipient of the Gladys Schmitt scholarship. Named after Carnegie Mellon’s first creative writing instructor, the $2,800 stipend is awarded by current department heads. There is no application — Amoroso was surprised to find her student account suddenly credited — and the winner is chosen based on outstanding participation and achievement.

Carolyn Elliot, a creative writing junior, shares a poetry workshop with Amoroso, and attests to her colleague’s talent and dedication. But it is Amoroso’s kind character that Elliot notes first:

“Everybody is friends with Connie,” she says. “She’s extremely friendly, very cool.”

Amoroso receives this praise humbly and appreciatively; when Dilworth presented her with an Amazon.com gift certificate as part of her award, Amoroso hugged her instructor and effused thanks, demonstrating her famously warm nature. But even in this moment in the spotlight, the poet is intently focused on the thing that has always driven her: her writing.

“The bottom line is: I love what I do,” Amoroso says. “Maybe this is all I can do, but it’s all that I want to do.”