Woodberry Poetry Room Awards Creative Fellowship and Grants

Today, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room announced Sawako Nakayasu has been awarded their 2019-2020 Creative Fellowship, while poets Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Brian Teare, and Tongo Eisen-Martin have been honored with Creative Grants. More about these honors from Christina Davis, curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room:

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship is Sawako Nakayasu for her project, “Sounds of War and Not-War, 1941-1945.”

Three WPR Creative Grants are also being given this year. The recipients are Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Brian Teare, and Tongo Eisen-Martin.

The Poetry Room’s fellowship and grants program offers stipends to artists and scholars to undertake creative projects that would benefit from the resources available at the WPR archive, as well as time spent at Harvard University as a whole.

Regarding Nakayasu's project, Davis write:

During her WPR Creative Fellowship, Nakayasu will work on an ongoing book project that encompasses a range of her multilingual writing practices.

This work will be based on the sound recordings in the Frederick C. Packard, Jr. Collection, with emphasis on recordings made between 1941 and 1945, thus tuning an ear to a historical period when the U.S. and Japan, the two nations of her racial and cultural heritage, were at war with each other.

Read on at the Woodberry Poetry Room. Congrats to all!