PB POETRY FESTIVAL Announces Fellowship and Scholarship Winners

Susan R. Williamson, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival (PBPF), today announced the five winners of Fellowships and Scholarships to the 15th annual Festival, scheduled for January 21-26 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. The three Poetry Festival Fellowships cover full tuition and lodging for the recipients.

"These fellowships represent a substantial investment in education focused on the craft of writing poetry," said Miles Coon, Festival Founder and President. "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. This year we have been blessed with very talented Fellowship and Scholarship applicants."

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2019 is awarding three Fellowships and two Scholarships:

The Langston Hughes Fellowship for African-American poets 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. In addition, he 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 Kundiman Fellowship for Asian-American poets was awarded to Shelley Wong from the San Francisco Bay Area. Wong is the author of the chapbook RARE BIRDS. 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 CantoMundo Fellowship for Latin American poets 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 been featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to the Nuyorican Poets Café, and co-organizes #PoetsforPuertoRico. For more information, please visit www.denisefrohman.com.

The Thomas Lux Scholarship was awarded to Cate Lycurgus of the San Francisco Bay Area. She teaches professional writing and conducts interviews for 32 Poems. She will study with faculty poet Aracelis Girmay. Her 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. She is matriculating in the Sarah Lawrence Graduate Program in Poetry for an MFA Degree.

The 15th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival will be held next January 21-26 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. Special Guest Poet will be Sharon Olds, the author of 11 books of poetry and winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyehimba Jess will be the Festival's first Poet-at-Large.

Nine distinguished poets will lead poetry-writing workshops at the Festival: Ellen Bass, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Stuart Dischell, Aracelis Girmay, Campbell McGrath, Mathew Olzmann, Gregory Pardlo, Chase Twichell and Eleanor Wilner, with individual conferences offered by nationally acclaimed poets: Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn and Nickole Brown. The Festival will feature these top poets at numerous ticketed public events, including readings, talks, interviews, panel discussions and more.

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is presented in partnership with Old School Square and is generously sponsored by Art Works of the National Endowment for the Arts, Morgan Stanley, The Legacy Group of Morgan Stanley's Atlanta, GA, the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, The Tourist Development Council of Palm Beach County; the Board of Commissioners of Palm Beach County, The Palm Beach Post, a grant from Visit Florida, WLRN-FM, and Murder on the Beach, Delray Beach's independent bookseller.

In 2010, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival received an Arts Challenge Grant from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and in 2011, it was presented with The Muse Award for Outstanding Cultural Organization (with a budget under $500,000) by the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.

For more information about the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, please visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.

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