Call for Applications: The Poetry Project’s Fellowship 2018-2019 Program

We are thrilled to announce the 5th year of our fellowship for emerging writers, Emerge-Surface-Be, with 2018-19 mentors Rachel Levitsky, Douglas A Martin, and Pamela Sneed.

Everything you need to know, including eligibility requirements, submission requirements, and more about the three mentors can be found here.

Applications are now closed. Three 2018-19 ESB Fellows will be announced in mid-October.

Please email esbfellowship@poetryproject.org with questions about or problems with your application. Below is an overview of the program!

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

Emerge – Surface – Be is a natural extension of The Poetry Project’s program offerings. It formalizes the distinct yet unspoken pedagogical aspect of The Poetry Project’s programs while providing a unique opportunity to support, develop and present emerging NYC­ based poets of promise.

Poet mentors Rachel Levitsky, Douglas A. Martin, and Pamela Sneed will each select an emerging poet to work with. Over the course of nine months, Fellows will be given the opportunity to work one-on-one with their mentor to develop their craft; explore publication and performance opportunities; and reflect on the professional and community-based dimensions of a writing life. Ideal Fellows will have a project they are working on or want to embark upon, and feel that they would benefit from guidance and support. Each Fellow will receive an award of $2,500.

In addition to working with their mentors, Fellows will have access to all Poetry Project events (free workshops, free readings, free publications) and be included in the Annual New Year’s Day Marathon Reading. Fellows will also read within The Poetry Project’s Monday or Friday Night Reading Series as a culminating event with introductions made by their mentors. Fellows will be invited to attend gatherings with the Project staff, as well as the other Fellows and mentors. Poetry Project staff and mentors will also work with each Fellow to find other unique opportunities for deepening, sharing, and connecting their poetry to specific goals the Fellows might have.

Applicants that have achieved some measure of local, regional, or national professional recognition will be judged favorably, as will applicants who have been published or had work presented in recognized publications and venues. However, the most important criterion is that an applicant’s work shows potential. Therefore, demonstration of a high level of skill and unique stylistic vision will be considered in the decision making process.

Our definition of “emerging” is a writer who has local and perhaps regional recognition and may have national exposure, though not national recognition. As a top limit, an emerging writer has published no more than one full­ length perfect bound book and no more than three chapbooks (not including self­-published work in chapbook form).

The Poetry Project embraces diversity in the broadest sense of the word. This principle is reflected in the choice of mentor poets and will be reflected in the selection of Fellows.

This program is supported by The Jerome Foundation.

Rachel Levitsky

Rachel Levitsky came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. In between those two events she wrote fact sheets and polemic for street actions demonstrating for LGBT and Women’s Liberation, Women’s Health, and against the state negligence of the AIDS epidemic. Since becoming a poet, she’s published three book length collections, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) and the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013). Levitsky is the author of nine chapbooks, most recently, Hopefully, The Island, part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist Susan Bee. Her current writing project is titled “Existing Condition,” and is a ‘memoir without memory’ indirectly addressing the ruptures of refugeeism as second generation post-Holocaust Jew. Adjunct and intersecting with her writing practice, Levitsky builds and participates in a variety of publishing, collaboration and pedagogical/performative activities. In 1999 she founded Belladonna* which is now Belladonna* Collaborative, a matrix of literary action promoting the writers and writing of the contemporary feminist avant-garde. She’s written and performed in a number of poetry plays. In 2014 she performed the role of Andy Warhol in Maxe Crandal’s Together Men Make Paradigms. In 2010, she co-founded the Office of Recuperative Strategies, which has staged urban walks and instant performances and instant publications during happenings in a variety of urban sites, including Alexanderplatz and the Gowanus Canal. In 2017 she was a fellow of LMCC Process Spaces, an open studio project on Governors Island and in 2009 she was Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. She is a Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute, and teaches irregularly at Naropa Summer Writing Program, The Poetry Project, Poets House and other situations as they arise.

Douglas A. Martin

Douglas A. Martin is the author of most recently of a lyric study, Acker (Nightboat Books). Other titles span poetry and prose and include: Once You Go Back, Your Body Figured, In The Time of Assignments, Branwell, and They Change the Subject. Douglas’s first novel, Outline of My Lover, was selected as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their multimedia ballet and live film, “Kammer/Kammer.” A Professor and Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University, Douglas also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Goddard College and divides time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and emerging visual artist. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works and a chaplet, “Gift” by Belladonna. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, BOMB, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She has appeared in Art Forum, The Huffington Post and Hyperallergic. In 2017, she was a Visiting Critic at Yale and Columbia University. She is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts for 2017/18. She is online faculty at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the MFA summer low-res program for 3 consecutive years. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universities, Smack Mellon Gallery, The High Line, Performa, Danspace, The Bessies, Performance Space, Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater, SMFA, BRIC and was an artist- in- residence at Pratt University, Denniston Hill and Poet-Linc, Lincoln Center Education. She has toured internationally. She directed a final showcase at Lincoln Center Atrium. Her collage work appeared in Avram Finklestein’s FOUND at The Leslie Lohman Museum in 2017. She has created cover collage work for an upcoming Issue of Sinister Wisdom, (2018) Legacies of Resistance, “Dump Trump.” She has received a Monica Hand, July 2018 scholarship for the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, “The 100 Best African American Poems.” Her short story book Sweet Dreams was published by Belladonna in April 2018. Visit http://www.belladonnaseries.org/sweet-dreams/