Present and Former Artist and Writer Fellows
The American Antiquarian Society offers Creative and Performing Artists
and Writers Fellowships for people who are creating works of art or
non-fiction in any discipline designed for general, non-academic
audiences.
Listed
below are the people who have been awarded fellowships since the program's
inception in 1995.
CREATIVE AND PERFORMING ARTIST AND WRITER FELLOWS
1995
Laurie Block is a filmmaker from Conway, Massachusetts. She has
produced
and directed the film FIT: Episodes in the History of the
Body. Her
screenwriting credits include The Great Depression and 1917:
Revolution in
Russia for National Geographic Society; The Last Plague: 1918
Flu
Epidemic
for HBO, and the independent films Secret Agent, and
Are We Winning Mommy:
America and the Cold War among others. At AAS, she conducted
picture
research for a television documentary on the U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848,
and also began research for a radio documentary entitled Beyond
Affliction, which appeared on NPR.
Nancy Vieira Couto is a poet from Ithaca, New York. Her book,
The Face
in
the Water, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press won the
Agnes
Lynch Starrett Prize in 1989. Her work has appeared in The American
Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review,
Milkweed Chronicle, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and other
magazines. At AAS, Couto conducted research for a book of poems and prose
pieces on a nineteenth-century historical character who called herself
America Vespucci.
Deborah H. DeFord is a writer and editor from Storrs, Connecticut.
She
has co-written with Harry S. Stout, An Enemy Among Them. She
has also
written I Wonder Why Skunks Are So Smelly (and other neat facts
about
mammals) and is a contributing author to the textbook, New
Elementary
Social Studies. While at AAS, she conducted research for a
young-adult
novel about the female American Revolutionary soldier, Deborah Sampson
Gannett.
Jeffrey A. Hatcher is a playwright from Minneapolis, Minnesota. His
plays include Scotland Road, Neddy, Fellow Travelers, Tango Delta,
Comfort
and Joy, and Vandals. The Yale Repertory Theatre, the
Actor's Theatre of
Louisville, Cincinnati Playhouse-in-the-Park, and the Illinois Theater
Center among others have performed Hatcher's work. His AAS project was a
play, Sockdology, about the actors in the play Our
American
Cousin, which
was being performed when Lincoln was assassinated.
Christina Tree is a writer and journalist based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. She has been a contributing editor and writer to the
Berlitz Travelers Guide to New England, New England Living, Fodor's
Boston, and the Boston Globe. Her books include
How
New England Happened,
Massachusetts, An Explorer's Guide, and Best Places to Stay
in
New
England. Her project at AAS was a history of New England tourism
for the
general public.
1996
Robert J. Begiebing is a novelist who lives in Newfields, New
Hampshire.
His previous work includes the novel The Strange Death of Mistress
Coffin,
and with V. Own Grumbling, a critical study entitled The Literature
of
Nature: The British and American Traditions. His essays and poems
have
appeared in such publications as: Harvard Magazine, Country Journal,
Boston Arts, Connecticut Quarterly, and the New Hampshire
Times. At AAS,
Begiebing conducted research for his book, The Adventures of
Allegra
Fullerton: Or, A Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from Itinerant
Life, published by the University Press of New England in November
of
1999.
Catherine Gammon is a fiction writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Gammon's previous work includes the novel Isabel Out of the
Rain. Her
fiction has appeared in such journals as The North American Review,
the
Kenyon Review, Central Park, and Fiction
International. She also served
as fiction editor for Cape Discover, an anthology of fiction
and poetry
celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown. Gammon conducted research in the Esther Forbes Papers and
the Cotton Mather collection at AAS for a novel about the Salem witchcraft
trials.
John Lee is a playwright from Los Angeles, California. Lee's work
includes the plays The Errand Boy, Dead Theater, Hitler's Head, Dog
Days,
and Clean Souls. His work has been performed by such
theaters as the Mark
Taper Forum, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe
Festival. Lee's work at AAS concentrated on a play about the "O.Orphan
Trains," o., on which orphaned and abandoned city children were sent West
in
the nineteenth century.
Aubrey Wertheim is playwright from Oberlin, Ohio. His plays include
Costume Drama, Popular Neurotics and Make Way for
Dyklings. Popular
Neurotics was presented on PBS American Playhouse. Wertheim's work
has
been produced at the Cleveland Public Theatre and at the Mark Taper Forum.
He conducted research at AAS for a full-length one-woman show about Fanny
Fern, the first female American columnist.
Kimmika L.H. Williams is a performance poet from Darby, Pennsylvania.
Her
published works include: Envisioning A Sea of Dry Bones, Negro
Kinship to
the Park, Halley's Com and It Ain't Easy to be
Different.
Her produced
plays include: A Chained Foot Stumbling on a New World, Brown Ices:
Chocolate Drops and We the People: the Real Ones.
Williams's work at AAS
focused on the life and times of the first published African-American
poet, Lucy Terry, who wrote "Bars Fight" in 1746.
Andrea E. Woods is a dancer from Brooklyn, New York. She is currently
rehearsal director for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Her
other performance experience includes working with the Danny Sloan Dance
Company, and the Clive Thompson Dance Company. At AAS, Woods conducted
research on African-Americans in the West for a music/dance performance
piece entitled Ballad of the Black Cowboy.
1997
Marilyn Arsem is a performance artist who lives in Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts. Her previous solo performances include Stirring,
Spinning,
Sweeping and Dreams (breathe/don't.t breathe) oHome. Among her
collaborative performances are The Burrow, with Malcolm
Goldstein and Bart
Uchida, and Clean Break, with Marilyn Gottlieb-Roberts. In
addition, she
was on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and a
lecturer at Tufts University. At AAS, Arsem conducted research on
nineteenth-century Spiritualism for a performance entitled Spirit
Messages.
Pamela Keech is a visual artist from New York City. Her previous solo
exhibitions include The Kitchen, a permanent installation at
the Lower
Eastside Tenement Museum, New York City, and Essence of
Tenement at the
Gracie Mansion, New York City. Some venues for her group exhibitions were
the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts and the American Academy in Rome.
Keech has also been a visiting artist at various universities, including
the University of Connecticut at Storrs and San Diego State University.
Her project at AAS was "Nursuries,"
an installation depicting the
lives
of children in post-Civil War America.
Stephen O'Connor is a writer from New York City. O'Connor's previous
work
include the books Will My Name Be Shouted Out? Reaching Inner City
Students Through the Power of Writing and Rescue, a
collection of
short
stories. His essays and short stories have appeared in such journals as
The Nation, Education Week, and The Quarterly.
He also teaches fiction
writing at Sarah Lawrence College. O'Connor will conduct research at AAS
for a history entitled The Orphan Trains: Charles Loring Brace and
the
Migration of America's Poore Children -- 1853-1929.
1998
Christopher Cokinos is a creative writer from Manhattan, Kansas. He
is
currently a visiting assistant professor in the English department of
Kansas State University. He is a widely published poet and nonfiction
writer whose works include Killing Seasons, a book of poetry,
as well as
works of nonfiction, critical articles, poems, and reviews. His works
have been published in Kansas Quarterly and The
Quarterly. He has also
served as assistant director of the People, Prairies, and Plains Institute
at KSU. His project at AAS resulted in the non-fiction book, Hope
is the
Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished American
Birds
published by Tarcher/Putnam. Christopher Cokinos also delivered a reading
of this work at AAS on Friday, March 24, 2000, the 100-year anniversary of
the shooting death of the last wild passenger pigeon.
Tom Dunn is a playwright from Henniker, New Hampshire. He is founder
and
first director of the Playwrights. Center in Minneapolis, and former
director of New Dramatists, the nation's oldest playwrights. workshop.
His plays have included: Darwin, Gun Play, In Pursuit of the Song
of
Hydrogen, and The Memo. He has also written books on
playwriting,
fundraising, and acting. Outside of the theater, he has written for
newspapers and magazines and has been a commentator for National Public
Radio. At AAS, Dunn researched mid- to late-nineteenth-century American
painters for a series of plays on Winslow Homer.
Cornelia Nixon is a novelist and short story writer. A member of the
English faculty at Indiana University since 1981, she is the author of
Now
You See It, a novel-in-stories published in 1992; Lawrence's
Leadership:
Politics and the Turn Against Women, a work of criticism as well as
short
stories published in the Indiana Review and the
Michigan
Quarterly Review.
She is the recipient of O. Henry Awards in 1993 and 1995 and a Teaching
Excellence Recognition Award from Indiana University in 1997, as well as
numerous scholarly fellowships. At AAS, Nixon conducted research for,
Martha's Version, a novel telling the true story of her ancestor, Martha
Jane Carines, a Maryland woman who killed her fiancé in 1869 and was
acquitted.
Barbara Weisberg is a television producer and children's writer. A
New
York resident, she has an extensive résumé featuring projects for CBS,
HBO, the USA Network, and Nickelodeon, as well as numerous writing
credits. She was creator of the syndicated situation comedy series
Charles in Charge. As producer of Livewire, a
teenage talk show series on
Nickelodeon, she won an Ace award for excellence in cable programming.
Her writings include Coronado's Gold Quest, a nonfiction
children's
book, and Susan B. Anthony, a young adult biography. She was
also awarded
the MacArthur Scholarship in Poetry on the recommendation of the late
Allen Ginsburg. Weisberg conducted research on the Fox sisters while at
AAS. To date, this research has resulted in an article that appeared in
the September 1999 issue of American Heritage Magazine.
1999
Nicole Cooley is a creative writer. Currently she teaches English at
Queens College, City University of New York. Her poems, which include
"The
Red Shoes" and "Romance," have been published in
such periodicals as The
New England Review, The Nation, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and
Poetry
Northwest, among others. Cooley is also the author of two books, a
novel,
Judy Garland, Ginger Love and a book of poems,
Resurrection, which
received the 1995 Walt Whitman Poetry Award from the Academy of American
Poets. While at AAS, she conducted research into the Salem Witch Trials
of 1692 for a book of poetry entitled, The Afflicted Girls,
which examines
the event from a variety of perspectives and re-imagines the experiences
of the people involved.
Jeanne Mackin is a novelist. A writing instructor at Ithaca College,
she
is the author of such books as Dreams of Empire and
The
Frenchwoman. In
addition, her articles have appeared in Country Living, the New
York
Times, Family Circle, and other publications. Mackin was the
recipient of
an Excellence in Teaching Award from Ithaca College in 1996, as well as
numerous scholarly grants and fellowships. She conducted research at AAS
for a novel, Adam's Hunger: The Lost Journal of Brillat-Savarin's
Travels
in the New World, which is based upon the life and travels of
Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin, the father of the modern cookbook, in New York and
Massachusetts, from 1794 to 1796.
Sarah Messer is a creative non-fiction writer and poet from Madison,
Wisconsin. She has designed and taught various writing workshops at the
University of Wisconsin and Salem State College. Messer's poems, which
include "Gossip, 1692" and "Grave Ledger" have appeared in Paris
Review,
The Sextant, Princeton Arts Review, Quarterly West, and
Kenyon Review,
among others. She has had essays and articles published in Yankee
Magazine. At AAS, she conducted research for a non-fiction memoir,
Red
House, which focuses on her family home in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and
the Hatch family from 1647 to the present.
Cassandra Smith is a doll artist from Chicago, Illinois. Smith
creates
historically accurate dolls and then writes fictionalized biographies to
accompany them. Her work has been exhibited in the DuSable Museum Trading
Post and the Shop at the Chicago Cultural Center. In addition to
conducting workshops at local high schools, Smith has also been published
in The Crescent Review and Obsidian II. She was
the recipient of a CAAP
grant from the City of Chicago, as well as other scholarly fellowships.
She conducted research at AAS for the development of new doll and costume
designs and accompanying background stories with an emphasis on free
persons of color and runaway slaves.
2000
Katrina Browne is a documentary filmmaker based in Berkeley,
California.
She has studied photography, documentary directing, and documentary
scriptwriting. She is also a diversity/anti-racism facilitator and
trainer. Her work in the AmeriCorps program included multicultural
leadership development and public service apprenticeship programs for
young people. She was Outreach Planning Coordinator for Twilight:
Los
Angeles, 1992, a film project that partnered communities, schools,
and
workplaces to use the film as a catalyst for dialogue and action on race,
ethnicity, and equity. Ms. Browne has received a William Randolph Hearst
Foundation fellowship. While at AAS, she will conduct research for a
television documentary entitled, Traces of the Trade, which
explores the
history and legacy of the slave trade in New England.
Maureen Cummins is a book artist in Brooklyn, New York. She is an
instructor in printmaking and book arts at several institutions, including
The Center for Books Arts, the Connecticut Graphic Arts Center, and
Manhattan Graphics. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United
States and is held in over 100 public and private collections throughout
the United States, Canada, England, South Africa, and South America. Ms.
Cummins is the recipient of one of the two William Randolph Hearst
Foundation fellowships awarded this year. While at AAS, she will be
working on a series of three works on paper that explore the fear of the
.other. in American history. The titles of the three pieces will be
Heretics, Heathens and Hellions; Animals, Cannibals and Savages;
and
Witches, Bitches and Faggots.
Sue Johnson, a visual artist, is currently associate professor of art
at
St. Mary's College in Maryland. Her work has been exhibited throughout the
United States and Canada and is held in numerous public and private
collections. She is the author of Memory is a Kleptomaniac,
Premonition
of a Natural History: Fireflies Burning, and the upcoming
Through a
Microscope Darkly and Other Accidental Images. Ms. Johnson is the
recipient of the Sigety Family Foundation fellowship for creative and
performing artists. While at AAS, she will develop new images and texts
for her on-going project, The Alternate Encyclopedia.
Joann Mazzio, of Rinos Altos, New Mexico, is a writer of young
people's
literature. She has published two historical novels, Leaving
Eldorado,
which was awarded a Spur by the Western Writers of America, and The
One
Who Came Back, which was nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery
Writers of
America. Her articles have appeared in Cricket magazine,
Children's
Digest, Highlights for Children, New Mexico Magazine, and
Goldenseal. In
addition to writing, she is also a speaker, and has presented talks to the
International Board on Books for Young People, and the International
Reading Association. Ms. Mazzio is the recipient of the Robert and
Charlotte Baron Fellowship, a newly established award sponsored by the AAS
Chairman and his wife. While at AAS, Ms. Mazzio will conduct research for
a young adult novel set in the Fremont expeditions in the 1840s.
2001
Geoffrey Brock is a recipient of one of the William Randolph Hearst
Fellowships for 2001. He is a poet based in Tallahassee, Florida. He is
currently working on a collection of poems based on American historical
events that he will examine from oblique, personal angles while basing
this writing on historical fact. During his time at AAS he will examine
the Society's collection of journals and letters in hopes of finding
resonant details that can be used to bring small vignettes of American
history to life through poetry. Mr. Brock's poems have appeared in
American Literary Review, Paris Review, and Hudson
Review, among
other
publications. He has previously been awarded residences at the American
Academy in Rome during the academic years 1999 and 2000.
Hallie Spencer Hobson is a playwright currently residing in
New
York City. She is the recipient of the second William Randolph Hearst
Fellowship awarded this year. She will be working on an ongoing project
entitle Watchnight, a historical play which unfolds on a slave plantation
on the New Year's Eve of Emancipation. Ms. Hobson will conduct research in
the Society's extensive newspaper and periodical collections, as well as
examine institutional records and relevant secondary sources housed in the
library. Her previous works have blended history and reality as she seeks
to tell stories about African American people and their communities in
both contemporary and historical settings.
Emily Laurance was awarded the Robert and Charlotte Baron
Fellowship at the AAS for the year 2001. She is a harpist and is currently
living in Carrboro, North Carolina. During her residency Ms. Laurance will
be utilizing the Society's collection of sheet music to research songs
scored for the harp. In addition, she will be constructing a social
context for the materials, particularly theatrical songs. She will also be
examining the selling and distribution of the instruments, the publication
of sheet music, and the art of performance in the early nineteenth
century.
2002
Deborah Muirhead has been awarded a William Randolph Hearst
Foundation Fellowship. At AAS, she will conduct research for an artist
book entitled, "The Conjurer's Apprentice or The Legend of Yellow Mary: A
Slave Girl's Tale of Survival by her Wit and Extraordinary Powers, as
written by herself."
Muirhead is a visual artist who resides in Storrs, Connecticut
and is a professor of art in the Department of Art and Art History at the
University of Connecticut. As a visual artist, she creates paintings,
drawings, and artist books. Her many exhibitions include: the ARC Gallery
in Chicago, Illinois; the Housatonic Museum in Bridgeport,
Connecticut; the Diggs Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; the Liz
Harris Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Mona Berman Gallery in
New Haven, Connecticut. Her work is displayed in the permanent collections
of such institutions as: Chemical Bank, Pepsico, Southern New England
Telephone, Aetna Life Insurance Company, the Connecticut State Collection,
the William Benton Museum of Art, and the Bloomington (Illinois) Federal
Savings and Loan to name a few. Muirhead has been awarded: a John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the New England Foundation for the Arts
Individual Arts Award, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Award, a
Yale University Visiting Faculty Fellowship and a YADDO fellowship.
Britta Sjogren was awarded the Robert and Charlotte Baron
Fellowship at
the AAS for the year 2002. She is a filmmaker who resides in San
Francisco, California. Her project at AAS is a documentary film that
explores the legacy of American slave dwellings tentatively titled "A
Chain of Windows" . Sjogren is an assistant professor at the Department
of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her films include A Small
Domain, which was a grand jury prizewinner for best short film at the
Sundance Festival in 1996, and Jo-Jo at the Gate of Lions, which
won the
Award for narrative film at the Atlanta Festival. Her other projects
include Green and Dimming and the script for Rage Carolina.
Ellen Wiener is the recipient of the second William Randolph Hearst
Fellowship awarded this year. She is a painter who lives in Southhold, New
York. Her project at AAS will be the creation of a new "Book of
Hours" using imagery from nineteenth century sources found at AAS. Weiner
has had solo exhibitions at the Sylvia Schmidt Gallery in New Orleans, the
Marilyn Pearl Gallery in New York, and the More Gallery in
Philadelphia. Additionally, her work has been exhibited at Swathmore,
Dartmouth, Saint Mary's, and Smith Colleges,
at Princeton University, and at the Nancy Drysdale Gallery in Washington,
D.C., to name a few. She has been a visiting artist/lecturer/critic at
the Brooklyn College Graduate School of Fine Arts, Louisiana State
University School of Art and Architecture, Washington University School of
Fine Arts, and Swarthmore and Dartmouth Colleges. Among her many
fellowships are ones from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.
2003
Ruth Lopez was awarded a William Randolph Hearst Foundation
Fellowship.
She is a writer of non-fiction from Chicago and will be researching the
McLoughlin Brothers during her stay her at AAS. Her project is a social
history on the artists who helped create children's literature in
America.
Lavonne Mueller was also awarded a Hearst Foundation
Fellowship. She is
a playwright from Chicago whose project is a collection of six short
one-story plays about notable American women -- Abigail Adams. Dolly
Madison, Sacagawea, Lucy Stone, Harriet Tubman, and Martha Washington.
David Roderick, a Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship recipient,
was
recently awarded the Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship in Poetry at
Stanford University. He will be using the resources at AAS to complete
a collection of poems titled Blue Colonial. This project focuses
on the
cultural interaction between the colonists and the Wampanoag tribe in
the early part of the seventeenth-century.
Britta Sjogren, also a Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship
recipient,
is a filmmaker from San Francisco. Her project is a documentray film
that explores the legacy of American slave dwellings tentatively titled
A Chain of Windows.
2004
Joann Dobson was awarded a Robert and Charlotte Baron
Fellowship. She is
a novelist and scholar of nineteenth-century American literature from
Brewster, New York who will be researching a new historical novel set in
New York City titled, Search for India. Ms. Dobson is currently
Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University. In 1997 she published her
first academic mystery novel and in 2003, her fifth, The Maltese
Manuscript, was published.
Martha Morss, awarded a William Randolph Hearst Foundation
Fellowship, is
a writer and editor from Mount Vernon, Ohio. She is writing a biography
of colonial printer Mary Katherine Goddard aimed at younger
readers. Ms. Morss provides editorial services to high school and
college publishers, including writing curriculum-based nonfiction and
poetry for younger readers. Her published works include "What's in a
Name?" (Cricket); Falcon Nest (Modern Curriculum
Press); A
Look Around
Whales (Willowisp Press); and "The Suds Are Still A
Bonus" (Christian
Science Monitor).
Alyson Pou was awarded a William Randolph Hearst Fellowship. She
is a
visual and performance work artist from New York City. Her project, A
Slight Headache, is a solo performance that explores the relationship
between a mother and daughter and is set in the mid to late
1800s. Ms. Pou has a multidisciplinary background in visual art,
dance/theatre, and writing and her work has been performed and exhibited
at numerous museums, galleries, art centers, and colleges. Previous
projects include To Us At Twilight and Black Rocks, Pearl
Buttons.
James Thomas Stevens was awarded a Robert and Charlotte Baron
Fellowship. He is a poet from Dunkirk, New York, and is currently
assistant professor of American Indian Studies and English at State
University of New York College at Fredonia. Mr. Stevens is a member of
the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. He will
be doing research on the Stockbridge Indian community and school to write
a long poem splicing historical texts with personal narrative. His
previous work includes a long poem titled, "Tokinish," and he a past
recipient of the Whiting Writers Award in 2000 and was nominated for
Before Columbus/American Book Award in 2003.
2005
Amy Brill was awarded a Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship. She
is a
writer from Brooklyn, NY whose articles and essays have appeared in online
magazines and in the anthology, Before and After: Stories from New
York,
and is a former fellow in residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts and
the Edward Albee Foundation. Ms. Brill will conduct research for her
novel, The Observations, a fictional account of a female astronomer
in
Nantucket in the early 1800s.
Camille Dungy was awarded a William Randolph Hearst Fellowship. Her
poems
have been published in numerous anthologies and she is author of the
forthcoming book, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison:
Poems.
Ms. Dungy is assistant professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman's
College in Lynchburg, Va. In 2004 she was named Scholar at the Bread Loaf
Writers. Conference, Fellow, Eastern Frontier Society, Norton Island
Artists' Retreat, and Fellow, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Ms.
Dungy will be researching a new collection of poems, Suck on the
Marrow,
Chew on the Bone, set between 1815 and 1845, which investigates lives
of
blacks and the whites they lived and worked among.
Charles A. Hirshberg was awarded a Robert and Charlotte Baron
Fellowship.
He is a New York based writer for ESPN the Magazine, columnist for Sports
Illustrated and contributor to Baron's and many other publications.
Hirshberg has held staff positions at LIFE, the Los Angeles Times,
Washington Post and Popular Science. Mr. Hirshberg is author of two books,
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in
American Music and ESPN 25. He will conduct research for a
forthcoming
biography, Vistas of Destiny: Thomas Wentworth Higginson in
Worcester.
Nancy Rubin Stuart was awarded a William Randolph Hearst
Fellowship.
Ms. Rubin Stuart, a director of the Women Writing Women's Lives Seminar of
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, specializes in
biography, women and social history. She is an award-winning journalist
and author of five non-fiction books, most recently The Reluctant
Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox published by Harcourt in 2005
and
featured in the August issue of American History Magazine. Ms.
Rubin
Stuart will research the life of American's first female historian,
Mercy Otis Warren, for a biography which will be published by Beacon
Press.
2006
Robert Shuster was awarded a Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship.
A
writer based in New York State, he has written on arts and culture for
The
Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, The Portland Oregonian, Adobe
Magazine, and Seattle Weekly, where he was a regular
contributor with
reviews and profiles. He was senior editor at Adobe Magazine for
three
years. His fiction has won several awards, and has appeared in the
anthologies Micro Fiction (W.W. Norton, 1996) and Yellow Silk
II (Warner Books, 2000), as well as in The
Mississippi Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and Sun Dog,
among other
publications. His second novel, The Herald of the Underworld, is
currently
represented by the JCA Literary Agency. During his fellowship residency at
AAS, he will research America's culture of war and the military in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for his non-fiction book The
Indestructible Soldier, which takes a personal, historical, and critical
look at the civilian fascination with war.
R. Sikoryak's cartoons and illustrations have appeared in
The New
Yorker, Nickelodeon Magazine, Little Lit, Fortune, Esquire, GQ, among
other publications, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents
America
(the Book). In addition to his freelance work, he creates comic strip
parodies of classic literature for magazines such as Drawn &
Quarterly and
Raw. Sikoryak is the co-author, with Michael Smith, of The
Seduction of
Mike (Fantagraphics), a comic book funded by the National Endowment
for
the Arts. He was awarded an Artist's Fellowship from The New York
Foundation for the Arts for his comics adaptations of the classics. He is
in the Speakers Program of the New York Council of the Humanities and
teaches in the Illustration department at Parsons School of Design. Since
1997, he has presented his cartoon slide show series, "Carousel," around
the U.S. and Canada. Mr. Sikoryak's research project at AAS is a comic
strip adaptation of Moby Dick.
Ginger Strand writes fiction and nonfiction. Her essays have
appeared in Harper's, the Believer, Raritan, The New England Review,
American Literary History, Theatre Journal, The Village Voice, Poets &
Writers and Swink, as well as books from Gale, Greenwood, and the
University of Michigan Press. Her fiction has been published in a wide
range of journals, and her novel Flight was published by Simon and
Schuster in May, 2005. She has received residency fellowships from the
MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as grants from
the Mellon foundation and the NEH. At AAS Ms. Strand will be researching her
first full-length work of nonfiction, Niagara Falls, looking for
handbills, guidebooks, travelogues, treaties, and images in the society's
collections.
Tess Taylor's chapbook, The Misremembered World was
selected by
Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America's New York Fellowship, and
was published in limited edition by the PSA in 2003. She recieved the
Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review and the Dorothy Sargent
Rosenberg prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southwest
Review, Crossroads, Painted Bride Quarterly, the Times Literary
Supplement, and Literary Imagination. She spent the spring of
2005 as a
Copeland Fellow in residence at Amherst College, and is currently a
teaching fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University and
serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at The Atlantic Monthly. Ms.
Taylor
will use her time at the Society to conduct research for a book of poems
titled The Family Chest that will examine two strains of her family
history -- one from Massachusetts, the other from Virginia.
Choreographer Kriota Willberg holds a degree in Dance:
Performance
and Choreography from Northeastern Illinois University. DURA MATER (Latin
for "Tough Mother"), was founded by Willberg, in New York, in 1993 as a
vehicle for her choreography. The Dura Mater cortege has performed in a
variety of dance, music, and performance venues in New York and the US.
In addition to working with her company, Willberg choreographs for
film/video, theatrical, and other dance productions. Her article on dance
and stage combat was published in the SAFD magazine, The
Fightmaster, in
2004. Willberg also teaches anatomy to dancers, yoga teachers, and Pilates
instructors, and has acted as a facilitator for various artists groups and
projects. Dura Mater's projects have received support from the 92nd
Street Y, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, the Manhattan
Community Arts Fund, The Field (Independent Artist Challenge Program and
Artist-Manager Partnerships), The Puffin Foundation, and Dixon Place Theater (Mondo Cane! commission). Ms. Willberg will spend
her time at AAS doing research on The Black Crook, America's first
musical
theatre extravaganza, in order to produce an up-dated version for
performance in New York City.
2007
Laurie Block, Conway, Massachusetts, documentary filmmaker,
"Becoming
Helen Keller," a documentary film and digital on-line museum project
(William Randolph Hearst Foundation Fellow)
Gino DiIorio, New York City, playwright, to research the life of
southern politician, Edmund Ross
(Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellow)
Heidi W. Durrow, Los Angeles, California, fiction writer, research
for a
novel-in-progress about Miss Lala, a mulatta strongwoman of the Victorian
era (Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellow)
Kimberly Elkins, New York City, fiction writer, a novel about the
lives of
Laura Bridgman, Julia Ward Howe, and Sarah Wight set between 1829 and 1876
(William Randolph Hearst Foundation Fellow)
Sarah McCoubrey, Fayetteville, New York, painter, research to
create "Hannah Morse: Landscape Painter," a fictive archive (Jay and
Deborah Last Creative and Performing Artists Fellow)
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The deadline for 2008 applications is October 5, 2007
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The Afflicted Girls
by Nicole Cooley.
(Louisiana State University Press, 2004)
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Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest
Continuously Lived-in House
by Sarah Messer.
(Viking, 2004)
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Notebook page with lighthouse observatory.
Leaves and oil on
paper.
Ellen Wiener, 2003.
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