Genre: Creative Nonfiction

Being Among

The Time Is Now
6.17.21

“I went to Bolivia assuming I would have connections with Indigenous Bolivians because of our shared identity as Indigenous people,” writes Ursula Pike in the preface to her memoir, An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, published in March by Heyday Books, recounting the years she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia. In the memoir, Pike, a member of the Karuk Tribe, questions her role as someone who experienced colonialism firsthand and follows “in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.” Pike’s travel narrative upends the canon of white authors of the genre, helping the reader to examine the overlapping tensions of colonialism across cultures. Write an essay about a trip that helped you realize your complicity in a social issue. Think about the perspective of the spectator inherent to the travel narrative as you consider the conflict in the essay.

How the Word Is Passed

Caption: 

In this video, poet and scholar Clint Smith speaks about the historic places he visited and writes about in his new book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown, 2021). A profile of Smith by Destiny O. Birdsong is featured in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Clint Smith
How the Word Is Passed
Little, Brown
2021
July/August 2021

Wide Open Writing

July/August 2022

The 2022 Lighthouse Sessions Men’s Retreat was held from August 14 to August 19 for poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and translators at the Whitehead Light Station, a lighthouse in Tenants Harbor, Maine. The retreat featured daily writing sessions on an individual and group level, coaching on how to read your work aloud, nightly wrap-ups, reflections, and a lobster bake.

Type: 
RESIDENCY
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
yes
Event Date: 
April 29, 2025
Rolling Admissions: 
ignore
Application Deadline: 
April 29, 2025
Financial Aid?: 
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
April 29, 2025
Free Admission: 
no
Contact Information: 

Wide Open Writing, 16 Twin Pond Road, Topsham, ME 04086. Dulcie Witman, cofounder.

Dulcie Whitman
Co-founder
Contact City: 
Tenants Harbor
Contact State: 
ME
Country: 
US
Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction

Tusen Takk Foundation

July/August 2021

The Tusen Takk Foundation offers residencies of three to eight weeks from March to December to poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers at the modern Tusen Takk guesthouse on an isolated peninsula on Lake Michigan, approximately 25 miles from Traverse City, Michigan, in the northwest region of the state. Residents attend one at a time and are provided with private lodging including a kitchen, living area, and two bedrooms, as well as round-the-clock access to attached studio space and the Tusen Takk Foundation library.

Type: 
RESIDENCY
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
yes
Event Date: 
April 29, 2025
Rolling Admissions: 
ignore
Application Deadline: 
April 29, 2025
Financial Aid?: 
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
April 29, 2025
Free Admission: 
yes
Contact Information: 

Tusen Takk Foundation, 5560 Leland Woods Drive, Leland, MI 49654. (231) 224-6580. Maggie Pavao, Assistant Director.

Maggie Pavao
Assistant Director/Managing
Contact City: 
Leland
Contact State: 
MI
Contact Zip / Postal Code: 
49654
Country: 
US
Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction

Deadline Approaches for the Letras Boricuas Fellowships

G&A: The Contest Blog
6.11.21

Submissions are open for the Letras Boricuas Fellowships. Cosponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Flamboyan Arts Fund, the fellowships aim to connect and support Puerto Rican writers. This year fifteen writers will each receive an unrestricted grant of $25,000. A second cohort of fifteen writers will be selected in 2022 and all thirty fellows will be invited to gather in San Juan in April 2023. Writers may be working in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or children’s literature. Applications may be in Spanish and/or English.

Using only the online submission system, submit a personal statement, an artist statement, information about past publication, a résumé, and a work sample of 10 poems or up to 20 pages of writing by June 20. Spoken-word poets should submit 3 audio files of up to 2 minutes each. There is no submission fee. Writers must self-identify as Puerto Rican and live in either Puerto Rico or the United States to be eligible. Writers must also have a history of publication in their genre. Visit the website for complete guidelines, including more details about eligibility. The first cohort of fifteen writers will be announced in fall 2021.

Housed at the Flamboyan Foundation, the Flamboyan Arts Fund was created in partnership with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton, his renown musical. The fund works to “preserve, amplify, and strengthen the arts in Puerto Rico” and has provided support to both organizations and individual artists. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, meanwhile, aims to “build just communities where ideas and imagination can thrive” and is a major benefactor of the arts and humanities in the United States.

Passing Strangers

The Time Is Now
6.10.21

“The poem, to me, is a conversation between people,” writes Alex Dimitrov in the latest Craft Capsule installment, in which he talks about his 2014 project Night Call involving reading drafts of poems from his second book, Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), to strangers in their apartments in New York City. Through intimate conversations and exchanges, he is forever connected with these lives and places as the poem “keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time.” Write an essay inspired by a conversation with a stranger you met in passing, whether at a grocery store, on a train, in a park, or elsewhere. Challenge yourself, as Dimitrov does, by including gestures or specific phrases you recall into the essay. How were you changed by this brief exchange?

Cathy Park Hong on Minor Feelings

Caption: 

“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest,” reads Cathy Park Hong from her essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), in this Yale Review video from their two hundredth anniversary festival in 2020. 

Genre: 
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Cathy Park Hong
Minor Feelings
One World
Yale Review
2020

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