Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation

Berkshire Taconic’s Amy Clampitt Fund 2011 Residencies Awarded

January 24, 2011

SHEFFIELD, MA—Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation today announced that residencies of six months each have been awarded from the Amy Clampitt Fund to Bruce Snider from San Francisco, CA and Glenn Morzzini of Cumberland, ME.

The Amy Clampitt Residency Program provides a poet or literary scholar with the rare gift of extended time and a reasonable stipend so that he or she may substantially further his or her creative work. Selected candidates live in Amy Clampitt’s prior residence, a three-bedroom cottage in a quiet residential neighborhood a few minutes walk from the village of Lenox, MA in the Berkshire Hills.

Bruce Snider’s first book, The Year We Studied Women, won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he was the 2010 writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. Snider will reside at the Clampitt House from February – July 2011.

Regarding the award, Snider said, “I've been a long time admirer of Amy Clampitt's, so it's a special honor for me to receive this residency. The time and support will allow me to complete my current manuscript of poems, "Paradise, Indiana" and to begin work on my third currently untitled volume.”

Glenn Morazzini will reside at Clampitt House from July – January 2012. Morazzini has had poetry published in Poetry, North American Review, RATTLE, and other journals. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won the Allen Ginsberg Award, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, and a Martin Dibner Fellowship He is also an adjunct professor of English at the University of New England, where he teaches courses on writing and poetry.

This residency is named in honor of the poet Amy Clampitt, who wrote prolifically from her cottage until her death in 1994. The Amy Clampitt Fund was established in 2001 by Clampitt’s late husband Harold Korn to benefit poetry and the literary arts, and is managed by Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.

Clampitt’s brilliant career as a poet began late in her life. Her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher, was published in 1983 at the age of 63. It was hailed as that rare first book that “signals a major poet in full bloom” (Los Angeles Times). Over the next eleven years, Clampitt produced four additional, major collections. A recently released collection of her most essential poems are gathered together in Amy Clampitt Selected Poems, published by Knopf.

The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Clampitt was made a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and completed residences at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College. She died in September 1994.

The participants for the Amy Clampitt Residency are chosen through a competitive application process. Deadline for submissions for residencies beginning in 2012 is August 1, 2011. More information and applications are available on Berkshire Taconic's website, the Amy Clampitt website or by calling 413.229.0370.

Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation builds stronger communities and improves the quality of life for all residents of northwest Litchfield County, CT; Berkshire County, MA; and Columbia County and northeast Dutchess County, NY, acting as an agent for positive change in the region. Since 1987, Berkshire Taconic has managed a growing collection of charitable funds created by individuals, families and businesses. Each year, the foundation distributes over $7 million through grants and scholarships for programs in the arts and education, health and human services and environmental protection, helping thousands of donors achieve their philanthropic goals and hundreds of nonprofits carry on their good work. Berkshire Taconic is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity.

###