United States Artists literature fellows announced
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The annual United States Artists grants have been announced; among the recipients are five literature fellows, each of whom will receive $50,000. Fifty grants will be awarded to 52 fellows; the winners include two pairs of collaborators.
Three poets are among the literature fellows: Terrance Hayes, who won the 2010 National Book Award for his collection ‘Lighthead’; A. E. Stallings, who earlier this year received a MacArthur Fellowship; and Campbell McGrath, a 1991 MacArthur Fellow who now teaches at Florida International University.
Oakland-born author Karen Tei Yamashita, who teaches at UC Santa Cruz, will also receive a United States Artists fellowship. Her most recent novel, ‘I, Hotel,’ was a finalist for the National Book Award. Playwright Annie Baker rounds out the literature award winners.
Our sibling blog Culture Monster writes of the many visual artists from Southern California who will receive the United States Artists fellowships:
The formally inventive, technologically savvy L.A. architect Elena Manferdini received one of the grants in the category of architecture/design. Long Beach independent filmmaker Dee Rees, who loosely based the upcoming movie ‘Pariah’ on her experience growing up gay in a religious black family, won in the category of media. Nancy Keystone, a playwright and founder of Critical Mass Performance group in L.A., won in the category of theater. And the region had two winners in visual art: assemblage artist John Outterbridge of Los Angeles, an instrumental figure in the Watts arts scene, and conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg of Santa Monica, who once described himself as a cultural ‘flaneur’ for his wide-ranging, mass media-inspired practice. (Other categories include craft and traditional arts, dance, music and literature.) Outterbridge, 78, and Ruppersberg, 67, are among the oldest recipients this time.
An awards ceremony will be held tonight at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, hosted by actor/director Tim Robbins.
RELATED:
2012 NEA writing fellowships include 2 siblings, 4 Californians
National Book Awards 2011 [video]
New class of Whiting Award winners announced
-- Carolyn Kellogg
