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Make Art, Not War

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Oh my, I won a grant.

Great news! I won the Verve grant for spoken word poetry for 2012!!!

I won! I can't tell you how over-the-moon-happy I am to be a part of this program and to get to do this project! It involves this little blog and hopefully some new, amazing poetry, and filming the whole thing and seeing where it takes me. I will have more details about the whole thing soon (I promise) but for now I am thrilled to be writing my bio for the press release and waiting for next Wednesday when I get to go to Intermedia Arts and meet the other awardees and learn about the program and receive a big fat check!

The really thrilling part of winning this grant is that it feels like the gun shot of the start of the next race. I put all this work and effort into writing the grant and applying for it in the first place, I can hardly believe I actually get to go and do this now. My year of awesome is just getting started! And, as a poet, I've come to accept that there is no money in my field of work. Every poet I read has a day job. So the validation and encouragement are nourishment to my artistic little heart (and the money will be nice). I can't wait.

So, now I really want the poetry show on the 18th to go well. It looks like we have a musical act lined up (one of my favorite local musicians, actually) and fingers crossed, we will get the whole thing filmed!
Hope to see you there!