Creative Writing and Translation Alumni and Graduate Students Receive Artists 360 Awards

Kat Wilson Photography

Top from left: Keely Brice, Megan Downey and Traci Manos; bottom: Rodney Wilhite, Samuel Binns and Peter Mason.

Mid-America Arts Alliance has announced the recipients of the 2019 Artists 360 Awards. Four alumni of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Translation in the Department of English have been awarded project grants, and two current graduate students have been awarded student grant awards. Their proposed projects focus on poetry, prose, and songwriting.

Artists 360, a program of Mid-America Arts Alliance, made possible through the support of the Walton Family Foundation, is a three-year pilot programt that provides grant funding and professional development opportunities to individual artists of all disciplines in the greater Northwest Arkansas area.

Grants include learning opportunities to develop entrepreneurial skills and build sustainable careers, creating a network of leading regional artists. 

M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Translation alumni recipients of project grants are: 

• Keely Brice ('10), at work on Hard and Breakable, a novel concerned with "how we cope when systemic carelessness causes a national tragedy."

• Megan Downey ('17), whose novel-in-stories, The Gods of Fate are Boys, "explores experiences of post-traumatic survival in women." 

• Traci Manos ('14), who will produce and record an album of original songs focused on "connections to kin, land, and lore. Listeners will discover elements of Americana, folk, blues, country, and Celtic traditions in the music."

• Rodney Wilhite ('13), the author of Recoil Bruises, a collection of poetry that "explores hauntedness, and combines lyric poetry, horror, sci-fi narrative, and experimental web design aesthetically drawing from the Gothic and Dystopian traditions."

M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Translation student grant award recipients are: 

• Samuel Binns and Peter Mason, second and third year poets, respectively.

In addition to this years' award winners, Artists 360 recognized the outstanding applications and finalists for project and student grants, including Jane Blunschi, assistant director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Translation, and fourth-year fiction writer Patrick Font.