The Palm Beach Poetry Festival has awarded three 2019 Fellowships, the Langston Hughes Fellowship, the Kundiman Fellowship, and the CantoMundo Fellowship for the 15th Annual Festival workshops. “The fellowships cover full workshop tuition and lodging during the festival,” said Susan R. Williamson, Festival Director. These fellowships represent a substantial investment in education focused on the craft of writing poetry. We have been working toward opening the doors widely to the festival workshops and offer participants the opportunity to work together with these exceptionally talented fellows who were selected from the largest applicant pool in our 15 year history,” said Miles Coon, Founder and President. “We have been blessed with very talented Fellowship and Scholarship applicants.”
The Festival’s 2019 Fellowship and Scholarship winners include:
The 2019 Langston Hughes Palm Beach Poetry Festival fellowship was awarded to Tyree Daye of Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his book River Hymns (APR, 2017). Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist, a Cave Canem fellow and longtime member of the editorial staff at Raleigh Review. He received his MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and the Nashville Review. Daye recently won the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for his poems in the Fall 2015 issue.
The 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Kundiman fellowship was awarded to Shelley Wong from the San Francisco Bay Area. Wong is the author of the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, Sixth Finch, and Sycamore Review. She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize along with fellowships and support from Kundiman, the MacDowell Colony, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, I-Park Foundation, Fire Island National Seashore, and SPACE.
The 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Canto Mundo Fellowship was awarded to Denice Frohman, a poet and performer from New York City. Frohman is a CantoMundo Fellow and former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion. Her poems have appeared in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, and elsewhere. She has featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to the Nuyorican Poets Café, and co-organizes #PoetsforPuertoRico. (https://www.denicefrohman.com/)
Additional workshop tuition scholarships were awarded to:
Cate Lycurgus of the San Francisco Bay Area, winner of the 2019 Thomas Lux Scholarship, teaches professional writing and and conducts interviews for 32 Poems. She will study with faculty poet Aracelis Girmay. Cate’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and elsewhere. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship Finalist, she has also received scholarships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and was named one of Narrative’s 30 Under 30 Featured Writers.
This year’s Sarah Lawrence Scholar is Amanda Volel, a poet who is a teaching artist currently working with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York. Volel is matriculating in the Sarah Lawrence Graduate Program in Poetry for an MFA Degree. Queens is her hometown.
