Happy Monday, all. Let’s get the week going with good news for some award-winners.
Of the six winners of the 2010-2011 Christopher Isherwood Awards, two are from—not New York, not Los Angeles, not Chicago, but—Charlottesville. Kathleen Ford, a novelist and short story writer who teaches in Albemarle County schools, and Emma Rathbone, the young novelist whose The Patterns of Paper Monsters made a sizeable splash in 2010, both receive a $4,000 grant to allow them "to devote time to writing projects and provide funds for research." Noted past winners include Ann Pancake, Rick Bass and Mark Wisniewski.
More awards? Charlottesville’s got ’em. The Virginia Commission for the Arts awarded two local artists with grants for works on paper: Janet Grahame, a McGuffey member who developed a rigorous process of stitching together etched pieces of collage (see below), and Tim O’Kane, whose vivid portait and still life paintings can be tough to distinguish from photographs. That’s $5,000 apiece for similar purposes.
"Just Open" by Janet Grahame
What’s going on this week?