This week brought monumental news for two PennSound poets who were chosen as recipients of 2020 Creative Capital Awards. These "exemplars of ... innovative, powerful, and challenging work" each received $50,000 in funding for their projects, along with $50,000 in career development services.
Tonya Foster was selected for her project Monkey Talk, which combines "poetry, dialogues, fictive FBI records, and non-fiction prose" to follow "a 20th Century artist-philanthropist relationship that is being tracked by government surveillance." "Focused on the ways that artistic creations act as monitors and are also monitored," the citation continues, "the multi-volume project tracks parallel, contesting conversations around race." You can read more about Monkey Talk here.
Mark Nowak was chosen for his Worker Writers School: Mobile Unit project, which "expands [the poet's] ongoing, twenty-year project of bringing poetry workshops directly to the working class." "Like bookmobiles or food trucks," the citation explains, "WWSMU visits laundromats, street corners, restaurants near construction sites, bus stops, and other locations that workers frequent to offer brief, intensive poetry writing classes." You can read more about Nowak's project here.
We congratulate these two richly-deserving poets for this tremendous honor. You can click on their names above to browse through recordings of their work housed on their respective PennSound author page.
We congratulate these two richly-deserving poets for this tremendous honor. You can click on their names above to browse through recordings of their work housed on their respective PennSound author page.
