Poets & Writers, Inc. Partner with Jentel Foundation
Under a partnership formed in 2003, Poets & Writers, Inc. and the Jentel Foundation began awarding recipients of the Poets & Writers Exchange Program a one month residency. Poets & Writers Inc. is a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation organized for literary and educational purposes, publicly supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the California Arts Council, foundations, corporations and individuals.
Initiated in 1984, The Writers Exchange Program is designed to encourage the sharing of works and resources among emerging writers nationwide. Winning writers are flown to New York City for a week–long visit with literary agents, editors and prominent writers with their visit culminating in a public reading. Bonnie Rose Marcus, Director of the Writers Exchange commented that the program introduces emerging poets and fiction writers to literary communities outside their home state and provides them with a network for professional advancement. Many participants have achieved professional success as a result of the program-getting their books published, receiving awards and fellowships, securing teaching positions, and setting down groundwork for their career as a writer. Mary Jane Edwards, Executive Director of the Jentel Foundation noted that the partnership will further enhance the quality of writers who come to Sheridan County and interact with members of the community through Jentel Presents, our monthly outreach program. Edwards added, “We are thrilled with the partnership and what it has to offer the community.”
Poets & Writers, Inc. publishes Poets & Writers Magazine with a circulation of 70,000 copies nationwide. The magazine is the primary source for what creative writers need to know. Along with essays on the literary life and interviews with contemporary writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, the magazine publishes articles with practical applications for both emerging and established writers. In addition, it provides the most comprehensive listing of literary grants and awards, deadlines, and prizewinners available in print.
Poets & Writers WEX Jentel Residency Recipients
2004
August
Jane Wampler
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jane Wampler is a poet whose works, nominated for a 2000 Pushcart Prize, have appeared in a number of journals including The Missouri Review, Atlanta Review, the eleventh Muse, Hanging Loose, and the Seneca Review. She is the recipient of a 2003 Poets and Writers Exchange Award and a 2002 Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship in poetry. She has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and is currently faculty at the Colorado College for the fall of 2004. Before receiving her M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College, Jane spent a decade writing news, politics and features for newspapers and magazines. Her stories, columns and commentary have appeared in publications such as the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, the Houston Post, Texas Monthly, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News. In addition, she is president of Poetry West, a 22-year old Colorado Springs-based non profit organization. Poetry West strives to foster the literary arts through free monthly workshops, critiques, public readings and by giving Colorado Springs poets a sense of community and support. While at Jentel, she focused on her first book of poems, a manuscript entitled Horse, I Reason.
Jentel Foundation Partners with O. Henry Prize Stories Winners
In 2003 the Jentel Foundation with the collaboration of Anchor Books began to award up to three Jentel Foundation O. Henry residencies a year to writers in the prestigious O. Henry Prize Stories, the annual collection of the best short stories written in English and published in North American magazines.
From the more than one thousand short stories submitted by magazine editors throughout the year, novelist and short story writer Laura Furman chooses twenty winners that stand out above the rest and up to fifteen additional pieces highlighted in the collection as the list of recommended stories, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contained brief essays from each of the three distinguished jurors on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories.
Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize Stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. The collections include such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" (1927); William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" (1939); Carson McCullers' "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud" (1943); Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1949); J.D. Salinger's "For Esmé--with Love and Squalor" (1963); John Cheever's "The Country Husband" (1956); and Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1963) were all O. Henry Prize Stories.
The connection the residency confirms is an old one: Neltje, founder of Jentel, is the granddaughter of Frank Nelson Doubleday, whose firm first published The O.Henry Prize Stories almost from its establishment in 1919 (The current publisher of the collection, Anchor Books, was formerly a division of Doubleday). Jentel's wish to include O.Henry writers among its residents is a generous recognition of the collection’s long history and, of course, the talent and achievement of the O.Henry prize winners. |
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Jentel Foundation O. Henry Residency Recipients
2004
April
Douglas Light
New York, New York
When New York resident and writer Douglas Light was not at work on his next novel entitled East Fifth, he was daily seen running the county road and enjoying the Wyoming landscape. Author of “Three Days. A Month. More” in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, Light has published fiction in such literary magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review and Promethean, and been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and he was selected as a finalist for the 2002 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. He is the managing editor of Epiphany, a literary journal and the first recipient of a Jentel Foundation O. Henry Residency.
When asked what he liked best about his Jentel residency, he responded, “The time to write; the community of other professional artists; the over-all atmosphere of Jentel and Wyoming. (I was) quite pleasantly surprised when I first arrived. I had the notion that my living space would be the size of the writing studio, and the studio the size of a mid-sized pick-up truck bed.
Archie Bray Foundation and Jentel Foundation Partnership
With the intention of creating an opportunity to develop more informed and thoughtful critical writing about the ceramic arts on a national and international level and further enriching the creative environment of the residency programs, the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT and the Jentel Foundation in Banner, WY established a collaboration on a shared residency that promotes critical and creative writing and thinking.
Since the end of the nineteenth century the cultural status of craft has slowly and continually eroded, in part, through the changing role of technology in western society. Simultaneously, there has been an increasing emphasis on the “conceptual” and intellectual over the object in mainstream art. This shift in aesthetic appreciation has spawned elaborate but limited definitions of both art and craft and heated debate about whether they are mutually exclusive.
The resulting by-product, then, is a dearth of meaningful writing about ceramics. Too often what is written is reduced to simple description, is driven by a need to make ceramics “art” using “art’s” terms, or is focused on an intellectual art-versus-craft debate that virtually ignores the object at hand.
The Bray was in the beginning and remains an on-going experiment where everything is possible. Extensive facilities, freedom to explore and a profound opportunity to grow as artists support the responsibility for residents to participate seriously and think critically about their work. Bray Resident Director, Josh DeWeese believes that this environment of free exchange and experimentation is ideal for an interested writer to explore, inquire and learn about the ceramic arts including a more complete knowledge of materials and the intuitive science involved in creation. The annually awarded residency includes time at the Bray to experience this environment that simultaneously encourages and challenges the individual.
After a few weeks at the Bray, the writer also has time at Jentel to focus, to develop material gathered at the Bray and to produce two essays about the Bray fellowship artists. The Taunt Fellow and the Lilian Fellow each receive $5000 awards based on the merit and promise of their work and begin one-year residencies in September. They work towards solo exhibitions of their work, scheduled for August of the following year at the Bray. The essays are published in a catalog of their work that accompanies the exhibitions.
Jentel Critic at the Bray Residency Recipients
2004
May
Stephanie Lanter
Wichita, Kansas
Stephanie Lanter is a Visiting Artist and Adjunct Professor of Ceramics at Wichita State University in Kansas. She received a B.A. from Xavier University in 1998, an M.F.A. from Ohio University in 2002, and completed residencies in clay at the Mendicino and Anderson Ranch Arts Centers. She has written for various catalogs, art journals and magazines. Though she was focused on a writing project during her residency, as an artist her sculptural and two dimensional works incorporate a variety of media and address issues of obsession and bodily neuroses. Among numerous exhibitions, her work was included in invitational exhibitions at the University of South Carolina and the Arts Incubator in Kansas City, MO. Juried venues include Transformation: Contemporary Works in Ceramics at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA and Ceramics USA 2003 at North Texas Art Gallery in Denton.
When asked about her residency experience, Stephanie commented that the other residents were brilliant, kind, talented, generous and hardworking. We respected each other greatly and got along very well. The ‘retreat’ aspect of this place was quite medicinal for me, and I absorbed an incredible amount of energy and knowledge from every single person I met. The quiet was very powerful and calming. |
