Grants & Awards

4Culture
This agency offers generous grants for arts and cultural work -- by individual artists, groups of artists, and non-profit organizations -- in King County, Washington, thanks to the local lodging tax.

Artist Trust
A key source of funding, excellent advice, technical assistance, professional development training, and good parties, Artist Trust supports the work of many creative folk in Washington State.

Institute of Current World Affairs
With its two-year full fellowships for young professionals (and not-so-professionals) to live, work and write in other countries, this foundation changes lives.

Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle
A dedicated, talented staff foments city-wide creativity, making grants to individual artists, cultural organizations, and education projects to brew up all kinds of art in every corner of the city.

Oberlin College Alumni Association
This association helps Obie alum continue their educations.

Richard Hugo House
Seattle’s literary center offers a writers-in-residence program, classes for writers and readers aged 9 to 99, a members’ library, performing space for writers and theatre companies, and much more.

Society for Professional Journalists, Washington Chapter
Their memberships offer all sorts of professional development opportunities, even discounts on professional products. And once each year, their Excellence in Journalism awards recognize writers and other journalists.

Washington State Arts Commission
A variety of Commission programs connect artists and arts organizations to grants and other sorts of support. Travel grants and funding for arts in education are just two of the gifts they have offered artists in Washington State.

Residencies

American Antiquarian Society
For nearly two centuries, AAS has collected books, publications, images, and ephemera at their library in Worcester, Massachusetts. They invite artists in all media to come and make use of their rich collection of material culture from pre-1900 America.

Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
In the delightful river town of Red Wing, Minnesota, this center gives writers, translators, visual artists, composers, dancers, and scholars both space to work and a community with which to share the work.

Blue Mountain Center
By a lake in the Adirondacks, writers, visual artists, composers, and social change activists generate new work, make connections, and replenish creative wells.

Centrum
Is it something in the air? Or the quality of light? Whatever it is, the artists, thinkers, creators and performers who come to this haven on the Olympic Peninsula can feel the creativity pulsing through their minds and bodies.

Everglades National Park
A biologist says of this national treasure: "The Everglades are a test. If we pass, we get to keep the planet." Each year, six artists have the opportunity to explore the multiple meanings of this observation. Read a report on the most successful National Parks' Artist in Residence programs here.

Harborview Medical Center
Arts Program Manager (and visual artist) Peggy Weiss has been connecting the arts and healing for eight years through the Harborview Arts Program. 4Culture and the Seattle CityArtist Program will make my June 2010 residency possible.

Hedgebrook
This utterly ideal island retreat for women writers worldwide is the epicenter of a wonderful women's word-loving community in Western Washington.

Jack Straw Writers Program
Not a "residency" in the usual sense of the word, Seattle's Jack Straw Productions offers local writers voice and presentation training, as well as print, online, live, and broadcast venues for sharing new work.

New College of Florida
Each spring, one writer has the honor of working with the students of Florida's public honors college in two creative writing classes.

Penland School of Crafts
This Blue Ridge heaven is one of the nation's finest craft schools. The Windgate Charitable Foundation made possible my two-week collaboration with visual artist Jen Coon, in Penland's printmaking and letterpress studios.

Ragdale Foundation
Two hundreds artists every year are given the space and sustenance to do their best work, in this 1897 Arts & Crafts home on the prairie, north of Chicago. A fellowship from the Katharine Washburn Winegarden Fund for Writing and Translation made my month-long stay possible.

Seattle University
Each winter, the Creative Writing Program of Seattle University invites a trio of writers to be "Distinguished Northwest Writers in Residence." Each holds office hours and offers a class in her area of expertise.

Vermont Studio Center
At the nation’s largest artists’ colony, writers benefit from the visual and creative energy provided by painters and sculptors from all over the world.

Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center of the University of Washington
Perhaps the only year-round writers’ and scholars’ retreat based at a marine biology field station, this center on Washington’s San Juan Island is a reclusive writer’s dream.

Writers’ Room of the Seattle Public Library
They say that Seattle is one of the country’s most literary cities – thanks in large part to our fabulous library system. And writers of all kinds have a room of their own at the library.

Conference & Workshop Scholarships

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
The best and most beautiful place in the country to learn how the publishing world works and meet some of the writers you most admire.

Fishtrap
This home in the woods for Western writers opens its doors and welcomes the tribe once each summer and winter.

Hassayampa Institute for Creative Writing
A cozy summer conference in the hills of Prescott, Arizona welcomes Southwestern writers each summer.

Interamerican University Studies Institute
A source for all things Spanish, from high school summer programs to post-graduate study in Spanish-English translation, all IUSI programs come with high-quality instruction.

Macondo Workshop
Begun in Sandra Cisneros’s kitchen in 1995, this annual writers’ workshop-gathering-miracle happens in San Antonio every August, operating almost entirely on volunteer labor and love.

Penland School of Crafts
This is a little corner of heaven in the Blue Ridge Mountains for anyone who makes books, prints, blown glass, sculpture, textiles, pottery, photographs, drawings, or iron/wood sculpture.

Washington State Arts Alliance / Foundation
Their annual Cultural Congress brings individual artists and arts organizations from across the state together, at the lovely Sleeping Lady Resort in the mountain town of Leavenworth.

Wesleyan Writers Conference
For more than half a century, writers have come together for a summer week of learning and listening at Wesleyan University.