2019-2020 Grant Recipients
Beyond Baroque
Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Program
The Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Program serves youth ages 14-19 with year-round literary arts, voter participation, civic engagement and performance opportunities. For low-income, marginalized youth - literacy is critical to survival. The Foundation supports year-round events that develop and cultivate the active youth voices of Los Angeles, provide platforms for youth poets to be heard and build a poetry demographic across Los Angeles.
Warehouse 508
ABQ Unidos Slam Poetry Project
ABQ Unidos Slam Poetry Project sends poets from the Albuquerque poetry scene into schools and community centers to teach young people how to express their feelings, emotions, beliefs and stories using the art of writing poetry and the spoken word. The Foundation funds poets in the in-school program from September through April. In addition, the Foundation is supporting a workshop for youth to compete in the Green Chile Invitational Youth Poetry Slam in Albuquerque and a team to compete in the National Brave New Voices competition.
Cardboard House Press
Contra Natura
The Foundation will provide honoraria for Anthony Seidman, who has been commissioned by Cardboard House Press to translate Contra Natura, the prize-winning work by Peruvian poet Rodolfo Hinostroza. Contra Natura is considered a contemporary classic of Latin-American poetry. Anthony Seidman, a Los Angeles-based poet translator, spent years living in the northern border region of Mexico, in Ciudad Juárez. His most recent books are Confetti-Ash: Selected Poems of Salvador Novo (The Bitter Oleander, 2015) and A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed (Eyewear Publishing, 2016). He has published poetry, translations, and writes articles in the United States, France, England, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Romania, and Bangladesh.
Barrio Logan College Institute
Poetry Workshops
Barrio Logan College Institute works with middle school girls in a program called "Circulo de Mujeres - Circle of Women". This program focuses on providing a safe space for young women to talk about issues that women face in society. Their goal is to connect the concept of femininity with academic achievement and success. The Foundation will support poetry workshops so that the young women can connect and share more deeply their thoughts and emotions.
VOX Press
Prison Writes Initiative
The Prison Writes Initiative is Mississippi’s only liberal arts based educational program for inmates in 13 prisons across the state. Their programs have served all sectors of the Mississippi inmate population: men, women, youth, the elderly and the disabled. After initial support of Poetry Workshops in seven facilities in the Mississippi Delta last year, this year the Foundation will increase it's support to include programming on Death Row and adjacent long-term segregation units at Parchman Farm, Mississippi's largest prison.
Oxherding Poems - Lewis Hyde Translation
Poetry Translation
Copper Canyon Press will support renowned translator and MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde in his translation of the classic Chinese Oxherding poems, attributed to a 12th-century Zen master. This collection of translated poetry and original essays bring an innovative take on a classic text and will serve as a masterful exploration of the art of translation. The series will also include original illustrations by the painter Max Gimblett.
Elsewhere Studios
Native American Creative Residency
Elsewhere Studios mission is to provide a unique and fertile landscape that nurtures the creative process and acts as a bridge between local and global communities. We facilitate focused time and space for artists in order to expand and transcend to new levels in their work, ideas, and lives. The Foundation supports the Elsewhere Studios Artist Residency for a Native American poet during the Fall of 2019. Paonia’s location in the North Fork Valley was once inhabited by the Ute people, and after being forced out of their land in the late 1800s, the majority of the Utes live on reservation land in southwestern Colorado. In order to support the work of contemporary Native American artists, especially regional Ute artists, as well as to honor those who lived here before us, Elsewhere Studios has initiated this funded Native American residency opportunity.
Henry Williams Love Foundation
Homeroom Poetry
Homeroom Poetry is a school-based arts education program that utilizes poetry and other creative writing prompts as a teaching tool to increase exposure to poetry, improve reading comprehension, writing and communication skills, confidence, and self-expression. The Foundation funds implementation of Homeroom Poetry in five schools in Metro Chicago with significantly low test scores in reading. HWLF anticipates providing services to 700 students. In addition, schools have the option of choosing the Open Mic or Special Event learning opportunities, giving parents and educational staff the opportunity to participate and increase their exposure.
The Wingspan Poetry Project
Developing the Poetry Audience
Initiated in 2013 by poet/educator Elizabeth Jacobson and offers weekly poetry classes at local shelters, offering the residents an opportunity to be creative and reflective in a safe and comfortable environment. The participants say that reading and writing poems helps them to unearth parts of themselves that are both stunning and tough to look at, and which endures on the page after we are gone. These intimate classes help to bring the participants closer in relationship to each other, forming stronger personal bonds, which we trust eases some of the trauma they are going through.
New Mexico School for the Arts
The Witter Bynner Poetry Series at NMSA
The Foundation supports a poetry series that will bring poets to the School's Creative Writing and Literature Program throughout the academic year for readings and master classes. The program will be a fully curated poetry series that will benefit the entire NMSA student body as it will be a cross disciplinary course.
Reel Fathers
Poetry Outreach - Fathers in Focus
Reel Fathers works with men, youth and families to promote a positive experience of fatherhood. Their Fathers in Focus Poetry Intensive is an outreach program that builds on highly successful program cycles for students at Santa Fe’s Capital High School. The program brings a dynamic combination of reflection, dialogue and writing/sharing of poetry on the theme of Father to youth in schools and communities throughout the region.
Resolana Farms
Creative Residency
Resolana Farms is a 37-acre working horse farm in Northern New Mexico providing land-based creative residencies and spiritual retreats. The Foundation will support poet/activist Native American Tara Trudell, daughter of John Trudell. Tara will use her time at Resolana Farms to write a memoir to her father, a poem of the story of her two weeks with him during his passing. Tara is an activist, academic, and poet who lives beyond Las Vegas, New Mexico. This memoir to her father, with photographs, will be quite significant historically, and for the John Trudell canon.
Telepoem Booth Organization
Telepoem Booth Anthology:
A Celebration of Telephone Booths and PoetryThe Telepoem Booth is a pluralistic, multi-sensory art experience that invites the public to visit a vintage 1970s phone booth, look up verse listings in the Telepoem Book and rotary dial a number on the phone to hear a modern or classic poem. The Telepoem Booth Anthology is a companion piece for the 3 Telepoem Booths located in New Mexico. The Anthology woks as a stand alone piece and also complements and enhances the in-person Telepoem Booth experience, creating a deeper understanding of the poets and the poems.
Fractured Atlas
Still Waters in a Storm
The Quixote Project is a long-form translation and theater undertaking by students at the Bushwick one room schoolhouse Still Waters in A Storm, in which students ages 6-18—children of refugees and immigrants from Mexico and South America—read and translate Don Quixote from the Spanish original to retell the story as their own, re-imagining the story of an old man in Spain in the late 1500s as a story of Spanish-speaking immigrant children living in Brooklyn today. The project is based in an intersectional, anti-racist framework, and is aimed at empowering our students through cultural tools and resources. The Foundation funds travel within and beyond New York for performances.
Artworks
Poetry in Schools
Artworks is a program of Partners in Education Foundation for the Santa Fe Public Schools. In 2017, Artworks reached over 1,500 students and 60 teachers in 16 different local public schools. During the Poetry Experience, students attend readings by established poets and create their own poems that are meaningful to them. The readings and original poems by the students are related to a specific theme. Many of the students poems are included in a published anthology.
City of Santa Fe Arts Commission
Santa Fe Poet Laureate
The Foundation provides the honorarium for the City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate. The Poet Laureate provides recognition of the literary arts by the City of Santa Fe, offers a platform for interdisciplinary arts, advocates for and raises the visibility of poetry in the community, increases the connection of poets to the public and fosters poetry learning.
Teatro Paraguas
Poetry and Theatre in Performance
Teatro Paraguas presents a variety of public presentations including the work of new playwrights and poetry open mic nights. The theatre was established in 2007 and provides a venue for alternative theatre and other performance art forms. Teatro Paraguas "Son De Domingo" events provide opportunities for poets and musicians to perform in an intimate setting on Sunday evenings. The theater is committed to working with teens and young people from both native Hispanic and immigrant families.
Santa Fe Girls School
Poetry Workshops
Joan Logghe, the third Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, conducts poetry workshops with the students at the Santa Fe Girl’s School. The school has embraced Joan and her participation as poet-in-residence. Joan and her students have published 17 volumes of poetry and artwork since the program was introduced in 2000. Poetry has the ability to empower the young women in the program and help them to find their voices at a time when social pressure is at its peak.
