Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Stanley Kunitz recently granted $12,500 poetry fellowships to poets Tory Dent and Nick Flynn. The awards are from the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. The fellowships are to be used to support the writing of poetry. Only two things are asked of the fellows: that they organize a local poetry reading (this year, in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, respectively) and that they participate in a poetry reading at the Library of Congress. The 2001 Witter Bynner Fellows read from their work at the Library on April 5.
Tory Dent is the author of HIV, Mon Amour (1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and What Silence Equals (1993). Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award; and three PEN American Center Grants for Writers with AIDS. She is also at work on a memoir, and has written essays and art criticism.
Nick Flynn is a member of Columbia University's Writing Project, where he serves as an educator and consultant in New York City public schools. He has won the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and a 1999 "Discovery"/The Nation Award, and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and from the MacDowell and Millay Colonies. He is the author of Some Ether.
The funding source for these fellowships, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, was incorporated in 1972 in New Mexico to provide grant support for programs in poetry through nonprofit organizations. Mr. Bynner was an influential early-20th century poet and translator of the Chinese classic Tao Te Ching, which he named The Way of Life According to Laotzu.
The Witter Bynner Foundation is giving the Library a total of $150,000 over five years; $25,000 for two or more poets each year to be chosen by the Poet Laureate in conjunction with the Library to encourage poets and poetry, and $5,000 annually for five years to assist with costs of the Poet Laureateship.
This is the fellowship's fourth year. Previous fellows, appointed by Robert Pinsky, were Carol Muske and Carl Phillips (1998); David Gewanter, Heather McHugh and Campbell McGrath (1999); and Naomi Shihab Nye and Joshua Weiner (2000).