Past
Grantees

OLIVARES, CHRISTINA, New York City, will travel to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts to conduct research in The Audre Lorde Project Archives at Spelman and June Jordan’s archived materials at The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. These immersive trips will allow her to continue a poetic dialogue with each writer on the subject of mutual preoccupations with race, gender, and love. This will lead to a two-chapter, book-length manuscript of poems. She’s particularly interested in studying personal correspondence and drafts of poems and speeches.

POMEROY, CARRIE, Minnesota, will travel to Bologna, Italy, to do research for a narrative nonfiction book about Charlie Chaplin at the Chaplin Archive in Bologna. Pomeroy is currently working on the fourth draft of a book for young adult readers about the making of Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 silent comedy The Kid. The Chaplin Archive at the Cineteca di Bologna holds the largest collection of Chaplin materials in the world, and, in many cases, is the only place to access key primary sources.

STANFORD, CLAIRE MIYE, Minnesota, will travel to Japan to walk the 750-mile Shikoku pilgrimage as research for an upcoming novel that explores different cultural attitudes towards death and suicide through magical realism. Experiencing the temples, inns, forest trails, and pilgrims who walk the road will provide firsthand information for her novel.

"LESLEY ARIMAH, writer, Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, will travel to Nigeria to conduct personal and academic research to aid in the completion of her novel.  She will focus on the underpinnings of Nigerian culture and the persistence of certain practices over the centuries. Arimah’s family left Nigeria when she was a teenager, but she has family members there who will help arrange visits with priests and practitioners, and attend ceremonies and masquerades. This research will expand the knowledge base from which she writes, informing her characters’ cultural rationales."

NICHOLAS BOGGS, writer, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Paris and Saint Paul-de-Vence, France, to conduct research for a book-in-progress, Loving James Baldwin.  The book is a personal account of his search on the untold story of Baldwin’s collaboration and love affair with French outsider artist Yoran Cazac, before, during, and after the publication of their little-known children’s book for adults, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood.  By visiting the places where Baldwin and Cazac lived, Boggs’ hopes to collect details and rich experiences to provide more profound substance to his writing.

"REBECCA DOSCH BROWN, writer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Oakland, California; Belle Mead, New Jersey; New York City; Washington D.C.; and Baltimore, Maryland, to investigate through a poet’s eye the social construct of Normality (and its counterpart Abnormality) across time and space, focusing on sites critical to disability history and on meeting artists and children with disabilities who contest that fabrication. Brown’s travel will be inspiration for poems that unearth and unhinge the myth of Normal.  "

"NONA KENNEDY CARLSON, writer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Dickinson, Williston, and Watford City, North Dakota, to study the epicenter of the Bakken Oil Boom. Research of the social, socioeconomic, and geographical landscape of this area and the impact on citizens, farmers, ranchers, landowners, oil company representatives, “Man Camp” managers, and those working in the oil field, will inform the characters, setting, and tone of her novel, Boom. Carlson’s immersion in local culture and the landscape will authentically inform her writing about family, greed, loss, class warfare, the repercussions of war, and complicated environmental issues."

CATHERING CHUNG, writer, New York City, will travel to Leipzig, Göttingen, and Berlin, Germany, and Paris, France, to conduct research for her next novel about students of a famous female mathematician (based on historical figures from Germany and France) during the first half of the 1900s, when women could not attend university. Chung’s research will center on the challenges her characters might have faced as revealed through personal papers, university policies, news articles, and photographic archives. Having firsthand experience with the geographic settings in her novel—streets, places, graveyards, churches—will help her piece together her characters’ daily lives.

"JOHN COLBURN, writer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Ghent, Belgium, to attend the Fairy Tale Vanguard Conference for research into his current writing projects.  Colburn’s fiction and hybrid poetic forms borrow from the tropes, worldview, and images of folk and fairy tales. Attendance at the conference will provide intimate access to some of the top writers in the field of contemporary tales."

"SARAH FOX, writer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to London, England, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, to research historical medical documents and artifacts at the Royal Society of Medicine and the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in London, conduct interviews with relevant doctors, family members, and DES daughters, and attempt to uncover related medical records.  This study will inform a book-length documentary text combining poetry, memoir, primary documents, images, scientific/medical texts, media reports, and dramatic dialog collected from interviews with DES Daughters. DES refers to Diethylstilbestrol, a nonsteroidal estrogen.  "

SANGAMITHRA IYER, writer, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to London, United Kingdom and Yangon/Mandalay, Burma (Myanmar), to research historical documents of Burma in the 1930s and witness current conditions to inform a creative nonfiction book project, Divining Water, which blends memoir, family history, and reportage.  Iyer’s project looks at the parallels between her work as a writer and engineer with her paternal grandfather, a civil engineer and water diviner who was active in the Freedom Movement in India.

"MARGARET MILES, writer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Cleveland, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Westchester, New York to research aspects of the lives of industrial tycoons John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.  This research will inform an anti-polemical creative nonfiction work-in-progress that weaves together the stories and voices of present-day homeless individuals and people of enormous wealth in American history. Miles’ research will familiarize her with the worlds of Rockefeller and Carnegie, major players in the corporate structure and financial systems of the United States as well as founding fathers of American philanthropy."

"R. VINCENT MONIZ, JR., writer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Belcourt, North Dakota to attend the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop and Retreat and the Returning of the Gift Native American Writers Conference.  Moniz’s goals are to hone his writing skills in poetry, poetic monologue, and spoken word performance. These workshops and conferences offer an opportunity to strengthen his skills and expand his knowledge."

"COLE PERRY, writer, Bovey, Minnesota, will travel to the border between Mexico and the United States, visiting four paired cities: Laredo, Texas/Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; El Paso, Texas/ Cuidad Juares, Mexico; Tucson, Arizona/Nogales, Mexico/ San Diego, California/Tijuana, Mexico, to investigate the collateral effects of drug-related violence and global apartheid on the migratory communities from Laredo, Texas to San Diego, California. Perry plans to create a detailed record of the voices, landscapes, and cities of this nebulous and violent frontier as the basis for a novel."

BUSHRA REHMAN, writer, New York City, will travel to Istanbul, Turkey, to conduct creative research at historic sties, write fairy tales inspired by Turkish history, and include these stories in her modern version of the Arabian Nights in which a Muslim woman saves her skin by telling fairy tales during her FBI interrogation. Rehman is exploring, in a fantastical way, the state of United States relations with the Muslim world and the experience of what it means to be Muslim in the year 2012, as an American citizen.

ROLLO ROMIG, writer, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Istanbul, Turkey, to study the history of progressive Muslim movements for a memoir about growing up Roman Catholic and converting to Islam, with a focus on the liberal traditions of both faiths. Drawing on library research and interviews, Romig is interested in telling the story of progressive currents in Islam and exploring the complementary connections between Islam and Western values.

NICOLE TRESKA, writer, New York City, will drive across the country to San Francisco, Archer City, Taos, Denver, Graceland, Nashville, New York City, Baltimore, and Mississippi, visiting independent bookstores, artists, editors, and writers to investigate and explore ideas of literary landscape in America.  Through interveiws, visits, observations, and experiences, Treska will begin a series of essays about the people and places that reside within and create the places defined by their representations in the great works of American Literature; for example, Poe’s Baltimore, Faulkner’s Mississippi, McMurtry’s Texas, Anderson’s Ohio, and Steinbeck’s California. While on this journey, she also plans to talk to staff at independent bookstores thriving in the face of corporate competition and e-publishing.

LATASHA DIGGS, New York, New York, will travel to Cuzco, Arequipa, and Ica, Peru to conduct cultural and linguistic research examining the revolutionary Micaela Bastidas and Afro-Andean history and to draw inspiration and ideas from the Peruvian landscape to inform her latest collection of poetry and spoken word texts. Diggs identifies with the historical figure of Bastidas as a woman of African Indigenous heritage living in a culture not her own. Her work uses rhyme, ritual and electronic music. The sound of language is critical to her investigation and she plans to study and do field recordings of the Andean language, Quechua.

PALLAVI SHARMA DIXIT, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Edison, New Jersey, to gather information and details about the Indian Day Parade. Edison, a small suburban town, is home to thousands of people of Southeast Indian descent. The Indian Day Parade, now in its seventh year, marks Indias independence from Great Britain on August 15, 1947. The procession traditionally features a Bollywood star as the guest of honor and draws thousands of Indians from across the region. This detailed field research will help her craft several chapters in her novel that takes place at the parade.

SARAH DOHRMANN, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Iowa City and Des Moines, Iowa, to investigate the mental, emotional, and personal ramifications of women activists participation in the second-wave feminist movement in that state during the mid-to-late 1970s. This will inform a creative nonfiction memoir she is writing about the causes and remains of her mothers suicide in Des Moines in 1978. Her mother was an active Iowa feminist and a sociologist by profession. Yet, her progressive social justice work was largely unknown to her children. Dohrmann plans to interview Iowa women who participated in the movement during the 1970s, some who worked with her mother, to understand the unique pressures and anxieties of this time and place.