Category: Grantee Stories

A piece of music, a story, or an image can be medicine. It doesn’t take a PhD to know this, but artist Dana Walrath’s long career as a medical anthropologist gives her a powerful language to describe how art can heal. She is quick to connect individual lives and actions… Read More

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust the work of the caregiver into the spotlight like never before. Nurses, doctors, hospice workers, and death doulas have become the most essential workers in the world, and the toll of their work among the gravest. This contradiction at the heart of care—that the wellbeing… Read More

William Alexander’s books take middle-grade readers to extraordinary worlds—goblin kingdoms, intergalactic spaceships, and, in his next book, floating castles off the Cuban coast. Tentatively titled The Ingenious Towers, the fantasy novel-in-progress has earned Alexander an FY2021 Creation Grant. The story follows three Cuban-American siblings as they pursue a… Read More

For Sarah Audsley, to be a rural poet is to “claim belonging in a rural landscape.” While the average American may not associate a Korean American woman with the phrase “rural poet,” that sense of belonging has always been natural to Audsley. Raised in Woodstock, VT,… Read More

During the Covid-19 pandemic, artists everywhere are discovering that the viability of their creative business depends on delivering their work digitally. In early August, the Council announced a special round of Artist Development Grants intended to help artists… Read More

Frances Cannon is living proof you don’t need a New York agent to make a life in books. I first crossed paths with Frances in 2014, when I published a poem of hers in the first issue of Mount Island, my independent literary magazine. Her first poetry collection,… Read More