Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation

August 1 Application Deadline for the Amy Clampitt Residency Program

June 29, 2011

SHEFFIELD, MA—Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation announced today that August 1 is the application deadline for the Amy Clampitt Residency Program. The Amy Clampitt Fund seeks to “benefit poetry and the literary arts by converting Amy Clampitt’s prior residence into a facility which would provide for a place to foster the study and promotion of poetry and/or a poet in residence” through 6-to-12 month residencies at the Amy Clampitt house near Lenox, Massachusetts.

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.

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. For more information, visit the Amy Clampitt website or call 413.229.0370. To apply, visit the grantseekers section of the website.

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.

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