Poetry Foundation Announces Emergency Grant Recipients and New Team Members

The Poetry Foundation and its Board of Trustees are pleased to announce the awarding of 61 emergency grants, along with new hires, and trustee appointments.

Announcing Emergency Grantees
In response to the devastating effect of the global pandemic, and the Poetry Foundation’s commitments made last June, 61 grantees from across the country will receive emergency funding from the Poetry Foundation totaling $855,000 for the cycle period that closed on January 31, 2021; this is in addition to $500,000 distributed in 2020 for individual poets and writers. Awardees include eligible non-profit organizations; read a complete list of the organizations, their focus areas, and the amounts of their grants. 

Welcoming New & Incoming Hires
Su Cho will join as Poetry guest editor this May, developing the September, October, and November 2021 issues. Cho is a poet and essayist born in South Korea and raised in Indiana. After earning her BA from Emory University, she went on to study poetry at Indiana University where she earned her MFA. She currently lives in Milwaukee, where she is pursuing a PhD. Her work appears in New England Review, Gulf Coast, Orion, Southeast Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her poems will be anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2021 and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. Since 2014, she has been working on literary journals and has served as the editor-in-chief of Indiana Review and Cream City Review. For more, visit www.suchowrites.com.

Suzi F. Garcia will join as Poetry guest editor for the December 2021, January 2022, and February 2022 issues. Garcia is the author of A Home Grown Fairytale (Bone Bouquet), the online editor for the Michigan Quarterly Review, and an executive editor at Noemi Press, where she has edited several award-winning books by emerging and established writers. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondista, a member of CantoMundo’s Steering Committee, and a former board member for the Latinx Caucus. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming from The Offing, Vinyl, and Fence, among others.

Poetry Guest Editor Ashley M. Jones’s first issue will be published in May, followed by the June and July/August issues, which are being supported by freelance Poetry readers Debora Kuan and tania quintana.

• Debora Kuan is the author of two poetry collections, XING (Saturnalia) and Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Fence, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She has received residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, and the Santa Fe Art Institute, and was recently anthologized in Bedford Freeman Worth's Advanced Language and Literature, 2nd Edition. She is currently poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, where she lives with her husband and two children.
   
• tania quintana is a writer from East Oakland, CA, and a recent graduate of the University of California, Davis, with degrees in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Psychology. quintana is held by their grandma’s green thumb, personalized playlists, and their best friends and fam who are really out here!

New Freelancers
As the Foundation continues to expand opportunities to our communities, several new, paid independent contractors have joined the Poetry Foundation to support Harriet Books, a reimagining of the longstanding Harriet blog, spearheaded by web editor Shoshana Olidort. Writers Megan Fernandes, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Ryo Yamaguchi, and Jay G Ying will review new poetry collections, focusing on books forthcoming from small and independent presses, chapbooks, and poetry in translation. Amira Hanafi joins as a news curator, to compile weekly poetry news roundups that reflect a wide range of perspectives and amplify underrepresented voices and initiatives in the poetry world. Each position is for a six-month tenure.

• Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in New York City. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Rattle, and The Common, among others. Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for a Kundiman Book Prize and a Saturnalia Book Prize, and was published with Tin House Books in February 2020. Fernandes is an assistant professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College, where she teaches courses on poetry and environmental writing. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
   
• Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer and translator. Her books include The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination, Beautiful English, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (coedited with Kayvan Tahmasebian), Cityscapes, and Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus. She teaches at the University of Birmingham.
   
• Ryo Yamaguchi is the author of The Refusal of Suitors, published by Noemi Press. His poems have been recently anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2020 and The Best Small Fictions 2020, and have recently appeared in the Bennington Review, Sink, and The Volta, among others. His book reviews and other critical writings can be found in outlets such as Jacket2, the Kenyon Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Currently traveling and writing full-time, Yamaguchi has worked previously in academic and literary publishing for presses such as Wave Books and the University of Chicago Press.
   
• Jay G Ying is a Chinese-Scottish writer, translator, critic, and MFA student at Brown University. His publications include Granta, The Guardian, The Poetry Review, and 3:AM Magazine. He is the author of the chapbooks Katabasis and Wedding Beasts, and is a contributing editor for The White Review.
   
• Amira Hanafi is a poet, cultural worker, and artist working with language as a material. Her works have been shown widely online and in offline spaces around the world. They are the author of the books Forgery and Minced English, a number of limited-edition print works, and several works of electronic literature, including a dictionary of the revolution, which won Denmark's 2019 Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature.

In addition, the VS Podcast announced the winning submissions for its upcoming Roll Call miniseries, dedicated to the past, present, and future of Black poetry. This paid opportunity provides space for Black creators to develop their episodes and receive guidance from VS cohost Danez Smith and Still Processing cohost Jenna Wortham.

Additional Updates
The Board is pleased to welcome three new trustees: Fabiola Delgado, Lynn Jerath, and Gwendolyn Perry Davis.

Fabiola Delgado is Assistant Vice President for Finance and Chief of Staff for National Laboratories, University of Chicago - Office of National Laboratories, Science Strategy, Innovation, and Global Initiatives. In her role, Fabiola (Fabi) serves as a key advisor to the University's leadership, and actively partners with the National Laboratories as they shape and deliver their scientific mission. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, she held progressive leadership roles at public accounting firms, Fortune 500 corporations, and private equity-owned enterprises. Fabi has an exceptional background in financial planning, global strategic initiatives, internal and external audit and global business process excellence. She received her BS and CPA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) with the high honors, and is a candidate for a Master of Liberal Arts in Ethics and Leadership at the University of Chicago. Fabi has a passion for learning about the physical and social sciences and has been an active participant in and sponsor of charities focused on empowering diverse youth in Chicago.

Lynn Jerath is the founder of Citrine Investment Group and has over 25 years of experience in institutional and entrepreneurial real estate investment. She is currently establishing a social impact investment platform.  Prior to founding Citrine, Lynn was with GEM Realty Capital and previously with The Carlyle Group and Goldman Sachs (The Whitehall Funds). She is a Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Endowment Investment Board, Advisory Board member of Penn’s Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, member of the Trustees Council of Penn Women, and has endowed an undergraduate scholarship. She graduated magna cum laude from Wharton in 1995. She is on the Advisory Board of Sundance Bay and an active member of the Urban Land Institute and the Economic Club of Chicago. She also serves on the non-profit boards of the Chicago Furniture Bank and Embarc Chicago.

Gwendolyn Perry Davis is Senior Director of Operations, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where she leads strategy for the museum’s physical campus, information technology, human resources and permanent collection programs. Prior to joining the MCA in 2011, Gwendolyn held leadership roles in educational fundraising for more than 15 years. Since 2001, she has taught as an Adjunct Faculty Member at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

Ydalmi Noriega will continue as interim administrative lead overseeing all staff and operations until a new president is named this spring.