Gratitude

I am grateful to all of these organizations, whose gifts of time, space, funding, or fellowship (in some cases, all four) have made my work possible.

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. I am grateful for their support of five of my writing and community literature projects over the past seven years. No matter where my interests range, 4Culture has helped me on the journey of discovery.

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. Three of their "Grants for Artist Projects" supported my work on two different book projects, one about Mexico and one about grief and loss.

Fulbright Program
I was named a Fulbright Core (faculty) Scholar to Colombia for 2018-2020. I spent a delightful semester in Fall 2019 teaching students in Javeriana University's Department of Literature. Though the pandemic cancelled my return trip to Colombia the following year, I devoted many quarantine hours to collaborating with women poets from three Indigenous communities to bring some of their poems into English.

Goddard College
I am grateful to have been part of the BFA in Writing faculty from 2013 to 2015. Goddard supported my research at Mount Tahoma (aka Mount Rainier National Park) with two travel grants.

Grub Street National Book Prize
This energetic and enormously welcoming literary arts center in Boston (if only it had existed when I lived there...) is a treasure. They offer an excellent array of classes and writing workshops -- some of them free! For many years Grub Street had a National Book Prize series to bring writers from outside New England to Beantown and expand their readership. No Word for Welcome won the 2011 Nonfiction Prize.

Institute for Comparative Modernities
This institute, housed at Cornell University, offers annual Global South Translation Awards. I was delighted to receive an award in 2021, to support the translation of Irma Pineda’s 2013 poetry collection, Guie’ ni zinebe / La flor que se llevó.

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

K2 Family Foundation
This foundation, based in Maine, has this breathtakingly inspiring mission statement: "[S]upport individuals who strive -- through art, education, or action -- to promote more creative and sustainable ways of living. Such endeavors may directly or indirectly engage notions of sustainable living, though all will likely foster the sort of dialogue that itself honors diversity of opinion and promotes knowledge as a route to understanding."

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. I am grateful for the support they have offered me over the last dozen years.

National Endowment for the Arts
As in many (if not most) countries, the biggest financial supporter of literary translation in the United States is the federal government. As a 2015 NEA Translation Fellow, I translated a second collection of Irma Pineda's poems, Nostalgia Doesn't Flow Away LIke Riverwater, into English. (That book is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in January 2024.)

Oberlin College Alumni Association
This association helps Obie alum continue their educations, even decades after leaving Oberlin. They supported my work on my first book and my MFA studies in 2006-2007.

Pacific Lutheran University
Several funds administered by PLU have supported my literary projects. A Karen Hille Phillips Regency Advancement Award and a Kelmer-Roe Fellowship allowed me to continue my exploration of the concept of "sense of place," developing both a book proposal and a new course in place-based writing. A 2018 Wang Center Research Grant supported my work-in-progress translating Irma Pineda's 2013 poetry collection, Guie' zi nebe / La flor que se llevó (Stolen Flower).

Poetry Foundation
Each year, the John Frederick Nims Prize is awarded to the “best translation” to appear in Poetry magazine during the year. In 2022, I was honored to share this prize with Irma Pineda, for four of her bilingual Isthmus Zapotec-Spanish poems, with my English translations.

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. I am grateful to have been writer in residency in there in 2006-2008 and to have taught that for a decade.

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.

StoryQuarterly Nonfiction Prize
My essay "Apothecarium" was chosen by Megan Daum for the 2016 Nonfiction Prize conferred by StoryQuarterly, edited by the MFA Program at Rugers University. The essay was first commissioned by Hugo House in Seattle for their 2014 Literary Series. StoryQuarterly published it in the Spring 2017 issue.

UCLA's Latin American Institute
The libraries at UCLA hold one of the largest collections of Zapotec literature in the United States. (You can even learn Zapotec at UCLA.) Thanks to a travel grant from the Latin American Institute, I spent a week in 2013 immersed in that fabulous collection of Zapotec poetry, prose, and philosophy.

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 Washington State artists like me.

Wianko Charitable Trust & Fred Tobiason Outdoor Scholar Fund
In 2016, generous fellowship grants from these two foundations, through Pacific Lutheran University's Environmental Studies Program, allowed me to begin a multi-year research project on the concept of "sense of place." A PLU student and I devoted ten weeks to exploring research libraries, the PLU campus, and Mount Tahoma.

Residencies

Acadia National Park
The first national park to be created east of the Mississippi River has one of the largest Artist in Residence programs in the country, hosting twenty-five artists (working in a wide range of media) each year. The Schoodic Education and Research Center (SERC) coordinates this wide-ranging program. Learn about all the Artist in Residence programs in our national parks here.

American Antiquarian Society
For nearly two centuries, AAS has collected books, publications, images, and ephemera at their library in Worcester, Massachusetts. They invite writers and artists working 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.

Cornell College
Each month, this college's twelve-hundred students take just one course, immersing themselves entirely in the subject of their choice. Twice each year, visiting writers travel to this hilltop in Mount Vernon, Iowa to teach a group of those students. I was grateful to be their Distinguished Visiting Writer in 2011, teaching “Legend & Lyric in Linn County,” and in 2023, co-teaching “Somatic Writing: Writing, Movement, and the Body” with my dear friend Sejal Shah.

Everglades National Park
A park ranger says of this unique natural wonder: "The Everglades are a test. If we pass, we get to keep the planet." Each year the Artist in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE) program invites one dozen writers and artists to each spend a month in the park, to help tip the very steep odds away from failing. I was part of this effort in January 2013.

Harborview Medical Center
Art Program Manager (and virtuoso arts instigator) Peggy Weiss connected the arts and healing for more than a decade through the Harborview Art Program. Grants from 4Culture and the Seattle CityArtist Program -- and the generosity of dozens of Harborview clinicians, staff,and patients -- made possible my June-July 2010 residency at this truly amazing place.

Hedgebrook
This utterly ideal island retreat for women writers worldwide is the epicenter of a wonderful women's word-loving community in Western Washington. I am grateful to have been a resident there for a month in 2003, and for shorter (equally wonderful) stays in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2017.

Helene Wurlitzer Foundation
Since 1954, Wurlitzer has offered three-month residencies to writers, visual artists, composers, filmmakers, and interdisciplinary artists. I am forever grateful to have spent ten weeks there in the Winter 2023, finishing a collection of essays, working on an anthology of literature in translation, and exploring northern New Mexico.

Jack Straw Artist Support Program
Each year, Seattle's Jack Straw Productions offers singers, musicians, performers, and other sonically inclined artists twenty free hours in their recording studio. In 2011, this program will allow me to record a trilingual CD (in English, Spanish and Zapotec) with Mexican poet Irma Pineda: her bilingual poems and and my English translations of them.

Jack Straw Writers Program
Not a "residency" in the usual sense of the word, Seattle's Jack Straw Productions gives a dozen local writers voice and presentation training, as well as print, online, live, and broadcast venues for sharing new work. Listen to an interview I did with 2008 program curator Judith Roche about my work. Listen to a reading by the writers I joined for the program in November 2008.

Joshua Tree National Park
I spent a good chunk of my childhood in the desert of California-Mexico border, not far from this national park. Each year, five artists and writers have the opportunity to live and work (in an off-the-grid studio) in this park, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island. I was there in November-December 2012.

Marble House Project
Since 2014, this residency, whose slogan is “art made / farm grown / community engaged,” has curated more than sixty groups of writers / artists / makers to live and work for three weeks in a beautiful stone house, on a Dorset, Vermont farm. I was enormously lucky to be part of the April 2024 cohort.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park
Each year, one artist is lucky enough to spend two months in residence at this park in Woodstock, Vermont -- one of the newest in the National Park Service and the only one to focus on the history of environmental stewardship. My two months at the park in August-September 2011 launched a new, multi-year writing project.

Mineral School
In the foothills of Mount Rainier, Seattle writer Jane Hodges and a team of stalwart volunteers have created an artist residency from an elementary school in a town that no longer had enough children to sustain it. I am grateful to be part of the very first cohort of resident writers, for two weeks in June 2015, to have returned for a stay in 2016, and to have volunteered there for a week in 2021.

New College of Florida
Each spring, one writer has the honor of teaching two creative writing classes for the enormously inspiring and hard-working students of Florida's public honors college. My time here in 2010 was perhaps the best undergraduate teaching experience of my career.

North Cascades National Park
My "local" national park offers residency opportunities for two to four artists each year. In April-May 2011, I was the first writer to participate in the Artist in Residence program in Stehekin, a town near the eastern border of the park that is accessible only by foot, boat, or plane.

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.

PLAYA at Summer Lake
This retreat center in south central Oregon, which is a “Center for the Intersection of Art and Science,” is located in a breathtakingly beautiful landscape. I was lucky to complete a three-week residency there in 2016.

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.

The Studios at Key West
At this community arts center on the famed isle at Mile 0, students of all ages create art, as do many local artists who maintain studios there, and a dozen or so artists and cultural managers who visit from all over the world each year. Read about their innovative residency program here.

Seattle University
Every 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. I was lucky to be one of those writers in 2009.

University of Iowa MFA in Literary Translation
Iowa City, the first UNESCO City of Literature in North America, is home to the country’s oldest MFA program in literary translation. Each semester, this MFA program hosts one Translator in Residence; to complete a translation project; teach second-year MFA students in a multilingual, multigenre translation workshop; read at the wonderful Prairie Lights bookstore; meet with students; and enjoy the University of Iowa’s literary community. I am devoting my residency to completing translation of a 2013 book of poems by Irma Pineda. (Read some of the poems from this book that appeared in Poetry.)

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. I visited every year between 2005 and 2012, for stays as short as three days or as long as six weeks.

Willapa Bay Artist in Residence Program
In the sweet seaside town of Oysterville, tucked away a the tip of the Long Beach peninsula, Willapa Bay offers monthly-long residencies to writers, as well as visual and performing artists, spring through fall. I savored a month there in August 2015.

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. Writers of all kinds have a room of their own (with a view) at the downtown 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. I attended their binational, bilingual literary translation program in Querétaro, Mexico in 2005.

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.

Under the Volcano
For twenty years, this bilingual (English/Spanish) writers conference and retreat has attracted a dazzling range of writers, from all over the world, to beautiful Tepotzlán, in the state of Morelos in central Mexico. Every January, this community gathers. I was luck to attend in 2018.

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.