Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Sarabande Books and The Baltic Writing Residency are pleased to announce their co-sponsorship of an annual Writer-in-Residence Program to be located at Bernheim. The goal of the program is to help realize its mission of connecting people with nature through poetry and literature.
Bernheim will provide the selected writers a comfortable place to live and work for a mutually agreed upon amount of time. They will oversee the daily needs of the writers and encourage and support their interactions with visitors, staff and other artists. The writers are expected to offer a reading or discussion during their stay. One event will take place at Bernheim. Sarabande and BWR will host another in the Louisville community.
Sarabande Books, a well-respected literary publisher and experienced facilitator of literary competitions, located in Louisville, will utilize its extensive literary network and reach in order to attract and nominate a nationally recognized or emerging writer. The Baltic Writing Residency program, also located in Louisville, will select a nominee using an anonymous committee of judges composed of an established poet and fiction writer, and one member of Harvard’s English Department. Candidates will be interviewed by all three partners before a final selection is made. Anyone interested in applying can do so through The Baltic Writing Residency.
The first Writer-in-Residence is poet Ann Townsend. She will inaugurate the program this summer at a date to be determined. Ms. Townsend, the Chair of the English Department at Denison University, is a Sarabande published poet and the author of two collections of poetry: Dime Store Erotics (1998), and The Coronary Garden (2005), and is the editor of Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007), with David Baker. Her poetry, fiction and criticism appear in such magazines as Agni, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Witness, and many others. In 2003-2004 she received an Individual Artist’s Grant in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and also won the James Dickey Prize in Poetry, sponsored by Five Points magazine. Her poems have been anthologized in: Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry By American Women (2001), American Poetry: The Next Generation (2000), The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets (2000), Imperfect Paradise: New Young American Poets (2000), and The Pushcart Prize XX (1995)
