Poet Begins Six-Month Amy Clampitt Residency
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SHEFFIELD, Mass. — Poet Dora Malech has been named the 22nd recipient of the Amy Clampitt residency.
For 15 years, the Amy Clampitt residency has provided poets and literary scholars a paid six- or 12-month stay at Clampitt’s former residence near Lenox, Mass., where they can focus exclusively on their work. Residents are selected by a committee that includes prize-winning poet Mary Jo Salter; Clampitt’s editor at Knopf, Ann Close; and Massachusetts-based poets Karen Chase, of Lenox, and John Hennessy, a past residency recipient currently on the faculty at UMass Amherst.
This one-of-a-kind award was established through the generosity of Clampitt's late husband, Harold Korn, who made provisions for it in his will before his death in 2001.
A poet, professor and visual artist based in Baltimore, Malech graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in fine arts, and earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has published two collections of poetry, "Shore Ordered Ocean" (2010) and "Say So" (2011), and her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Poetry London, Tin House, The Yale Review and more.
Malech is co-founder and former director of Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts engagement program for children and teens. Currently, she serves on the faculty of the Writing Seminars at John Hopkins University and participates in Writers in Baltimore Schools, a program that provides low-income middle school students with creative writing workshops.
Malech will spend her residency working on a new collection of poetry and a book of prose.
"It’s so significant to have this time and space to focus and to be able to dignify my own work," Malech said. "The luxury of being able to have a creative path for these months that I'm here is really fantastic and invaluable."
