Congratulations to Elizabeth Jacobson, recipient of a Poets Laureate Fellowship from The American Academy of Poets, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to support this project for Santa Fe!

In collaboration with Axle Contemporary and YouthWorks' Santa Fe Community Screenprinting studio, Jacobson has created a poetry and visual arts venture for high school teenagers encompassing the study and crafting of poems, graphic design and silk screening of poetry on t-shirts, portrait photography, readings, and publication of an anthology.

Elizabeth Jacobson
Elizabeth Jacobson, originally from New York, has lived for over thirty years in New Mexico.  She received an MFA from Columbia University in Creative Writing and a BA from Rollins College in English Literature. She is the author, most recently, of Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019) which won the New Measure Poetry Prize selected by Marianne Boruch, and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book.  Boruch writes, “Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems.”  Jacobson’s other books include a full-length collection Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012) and two chapbooks from dancing girl press: Are the Children Make Believe? (2017) and A Brown Stone (2015). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which since 2013 has conducted weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in Santa Fe, New Mexico. WingSpan has received four grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and a Community Partners Award from the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families. She is the Reviews Editor for the online literary journal Terrain.org. and teaches poetry workshops regularly in the Santa Fe community.  In July 2019, Jacobson was appointed Poet Laureate for the City of Santa Fe.

-------

“As we face the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people are turning to poetry for comfort and courage. We are honored and humbled in this moment of great need to fund poets who are talented artists and community organizers, who will most certainly help guide their communities forward,” said Jennifer Benka, President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets.


The Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states. Founded in 1934, the organization produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; organizes National Poetry Month; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides award-winning resources to K–12 educators, including the Teach This Poem series; administers the American Poets Prizes; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture. Through its prize program, the organization annually awards more funds to individual poets than any other organization, giving a total of $1,250,000 to more than 200 poets at various stages of their careers. This year, in response to the global health crisis, the Academy launched the #ShelterInPoems initiative, inviting members of the public to select poems of comfort and courage from its online collection to share with others on social media. The initiative culminated in the organization’s first-ever virtual reading, which was watched more than 25,000 times by viewers in more than 40 countries around the world. The Academy is also one of seven national organizations that comprise Artist Relief, a multidisciplinary coalition of arts grantmakers and a consortium of foundations working to provide resources and funding to the country’s individual poets, writers, and artists who are impacted by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
 

-------

“We are gratified to support the poets laureate fellows as they engage their communities around the unprecedented challenges of our moment, making work that provides meaning, brings beauty, and helps us, in Lucille Clifton’s words, ‘sail through this to that,’” said Elizabeth Alexander, poet and President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to strengthen, promote, and defend the centrality of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse, fair, and democratic societies.  To this end, our core programs support exemplary and inspiring institutions of higher education and culture. The Arts and Cultural Heritage program seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and conservation practices in the arts, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for these disciplines.  The program supports the work of outstanding artists, curators, conservators, and scholars, and endeavors to strengthen performing arts organizations, art museums, research institutes, and conservation centers.

​