Artist Trust has extended the deadline for its annual Grants for Artist Projects. Poets and prose writers now have until June 25 to submit entries for grants of up to fifteen hundred dollars to support specific literary endeavors. Grant applications will be available online in May.
The recipients will be selected by a panel of Washington state writers. Last year's eleven grantees were chosen from a pool of 167 entries by poets Samuel Green, the state poet laureate, and Dennis Held and fiction writers Adrianne Harun, Philip H. Red Eagle, and Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner.
The recipients—six women and five men—included four poets, five fiction writers, and two creative nonfiction writers. Five out of the eleven were residents of Seattle, King County, less than the average of the applicant pool across disciplines, which has been comprised of over 60 percent King County residents for the past several years. Most 2009 winners in literary arts received the full fifteen-hundred-dollar award.
In the video below, 2009 grantee Oliver de la Paz, who received funds to purchase a laptop and work on his poetry manuscript "Grace Equations," reads with New Jersey poet Evie Shockley.