Trillium Arts is delighted to announce Kim Crutcher of Chicago, IL as the 2024 awardee for the “Miss Sarah” Fellowship for Black Women Writers. The Fellowship, named in honor of Sarah M. Johnson of Hickory, NC, aims to provide Black women writers a restful environment conducive to reflection and writing. It also offers uninterrupted time to plant the seed of an idea for a new writing project or to develop or complete a project underway. Learn more about the "Miss Sarah" Fellowship Program.
A panel of esteemed black women writers reviewed 45 competitive applications that were received from around the country in the genre of Fiction. The panel ultimately awarded the Fellowship to Ms. Crutcher for the 2024 cycle. The “Miss Sarah” Fellowship offers a variety of benefits including a $1,000 honorarium, transportation, and accommodations for ten days in July at the Trillium Arts artist residency location in rural Mars Hill, NC and/or at “Montford Manor” in downtown Asheville, NC.
About the “Miss Sarah” Fellowship Awardee:
Kim Crutcher is a licensed psychotherapist and ordained Interfaith Minister. She tells, shares, makes up and listens to stories as a mode of healing and a method of providing education to the communities that welcome her in as a teacher, preacher, facilitator or artist. Currently, Kim is the Herbalism Conductor for Urban Growers Collective’s Herbal Apprenticeship Program in Chicago IL. She has a private psychotherapy practice serving individuals, groups and families; and she leads public and private rituals for celebrations, life transitions, as well as communal and organization change. Kim is a long-term artistic associate with MPAACT Theatre where she has been directing new plays for over twenty years. Having been raised in a community and family that valued storytelling and storytellings has led her to value story as one of the most powerful medicines available to our species.
Fellowship Plans
“I will use the quiet of the Trillium Arts residency to write my novel. The working title is Buffaloed; and the main characters emerged as minor players in a children's play that I wrote and directed almost twenty years ago. In the novel the two main characters move between realms as the woman goes on a quest to save the man in both body and soul. The most difficult portions to write have been the chapters when each character is moving from one ‘realm’ or way of knowing, into a new realm. Both characters have multiple entrances into liminal spaces, of communicating with spiritual and/or mythical beings, and of learning the rules of those new realities. I welcome the deep quiet to define the subtleties of such transitions. The hope is that readers will feel that it is possible that forces like Nature and Creation are on our side; are with us; are supportive of our desires. My experience will offer a retreat like state of peace that allows a different type of listening than what is available to me at my dining room table in downtown Chicago."
About the Review Panelists
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist/scholar/facilitator who employs Black Feminist principles and theatrical jazz aesthetics in her work. Her original performances include sista docta, a critique of academic life, and Searching for Ọ̀ṣun, an ethnographic performance installation around the Divinity of the River. Her most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, a collaborative ethnography focusing on three theatrical jazz practitioners. Omi is Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D, is Founding Director of the Women's Research & Resource Center at Spelman College and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies. She is past president of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also edited Words Of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought and co-authored with Johnnetta B. Cole Gender Talk: The Struggle For Women's Equality In African American Communities.
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and, most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018); a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); a memoir, Memorial Drive (2020) an instant New York Times Bestseller; and The House of Being, a meditation on writing, forthcoming this April. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress. In 2022 she was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.