My Guggenheim App
Before the pay wall, I wanted to share the news that Clean Air has been optioned for television by the Onyx Collective with Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media producing! I hope to share lots of news about that over the coming months/years!
Now onto the post…
Since 2019, I’ve been applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship for my poetry. It’s a tricky application because it’s a long description of the project you’re working on, your Statement of Plans, but you don’t apply with an excerpt from that project. (I can’t speak to how this works in other fields, so the info below is just what I know about the poetry application process.)
The application requires many letters of recommendation, and it is an unwritten rule that your letters should be from past Guggenheim recipients. This means past Guggenheim recipients are often swarmed with requests. Some will only write one letter. If they do agree to write more than one letter, Guggenheim makes them rank the poets for whom they are writing letters.
If you come to your genre through an unconventional path, it might be hard for you to know anyone who’s supposed to write your letters. While I have amazing, wonderful, generous letter-writers for poetry, I don’t think I could apply for prose. I have studied with very few prose writers, and the ones who I have worked with, who are brilliant, have not received Guggenheim fellowships.
The application also involves getting multiple physical copies of your past books to the foundation, which is quite expensive. For picking up your books at the end of judging, they used to say that you could come to their offices in NYC, which made the award feel like it was focused on NYC-based poets. Though this part of the application process does seem to be changing to watermarked electronic copies! I hope they make that switch entirely.
All of this to say, I think I’m taking a break from applying to the Guggenheim.
For two years in a row, I’ve sent in the same project description because it’s still the project I’m working on. (Books can take a long time to write!) As I’m looking ahead to next year, I don’t feel confident sending in the same project description again. My letter-writers don’t feel great about sending in the same letters. The foundation has made it clear that it’s not a project that they are about to support, so why should I put us all through it again?
Maybe in a few years, when I’m writing poems with a new focus, then I’ll try again.
So I figured I’d share my Statement of Plans here (edited slightly). You will notice that there are things in here that I’ve expanded on for previous Substack posts. Thank you for being a space where I’ve been able to explore these themes that mean so much to me.
Statement of Plans