Tonight’s Tracy K. Smith reading is just the beginning for a weekend of great poetry. The weekend’s Poetry Conference will be an electrifying opportunity to rejuvenate your work, meet other poets, and gather inspiration from presenters’ readings, discussions, and craft sessions. But save some energy for Monday night, because after the conference has ended and we’ve put away our notebooks, Marilyn Nelson will read for Literary Witnesses, a program at Plymouth Congregational Church co-sponsored by the Loft.

Earlier this year Nelson was awarded the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, honoring work that is as uncommon as it is visionary. Nelson is that rare kind of writer whose poetry addresses both youth and adults. For families with children, everyone will hear poems that resonate with them at Monday’s reading.

Jazz pianist Bryan Nichols will add musical accompaniment. Nelson is known to collaborate regularly with musicians in performance. In 2010, when she came to the Loft in the role of judge for the McKnight Artists Fellowships for Writers, Nelson gave a reading accompanied by saxophone, clarinet, and flute.

Loft staff who heard Nelson read at the AWP conference reported that the audience enjoyed Nelson’s give-and-take style of presenting work.  At that event, she shared the stage with Molly Peacock, who will give the keynote address at the upcoming conference for Writers 50 and Better.

Ari Edes is the Loft’s office manager.

The Loft is thrilled to announce that the Surdna Foundation in New York has awarded a $150,000 grant to the Loft to expand its spoken word programming. The grant will support spoken word artists of color through community-based artist immersion fellowships and performances as part of the Equilibrium (EQ) series, which is celebrating its 10^th season.

New Immersion Fellowship Grant

The Surdna Foundation funding will establish two cycles of spoken word immersion fellowships, with three to four fellows selected per cycle to receive up to $8,000 in support. One of the fellows from each cycle will be from Minnesota, but the grant will be open to national artists.

The Immersion Fellowship will support six to eight artists of color or indigenous descent in self-designed projects that help them better understand the communities and issues that inform their work. Examples of projects might include a month-long mentorship with elders on a reservation or a series of performances and discussion in a neighborhood market. The goal is to buy artists time to work, to advance and catalyze their artistic development, and to increase exposure to the art of spoken word.

Guidelines and details are not yet available for the award, but please check for details at www.loft.org or signup for the Loft’s enewsletter to be notified when the guidelines are available.

Expansion of Equilibrium

For a decade, the Loft has presented Equilibrium, a spoken word performance series in which artists of color engage audiences in provocative issues. Last year, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits honored Equilibrium with its Nonprofit Mission Award for Anti-Racism.

As EQ celebrates its 10th year, the project will ensure four annual Equilibrium performances at the Loft for the next two years. Each Immersion Fellow will perform and/or co-curate an Equilibrium show during the project period. By performing at the Loft, these local and national voices will find a platform to increase visibility and conversation around spoken word. Each performance will be professionally recorded so that these voices may be seen and heard by anyone with an internet connection.

Program Leadership

Bao Phi, Loft associate program director, EQ founder, and nationally acclaimed poet/spoken word artist, will have primary responsibility for selecting panelists, promoting the opportunity, facilitating applications, coaching fellows throughout their immersions, adjusting the program design, and leading the reflective processes built into the project.

By the end of the project, the Loft and Surdna hope that these efforts will increase exposure and conversation around the art of spoken word, and lead toward broader acceptance of spoken word as a literary genre that can be an important part of the established literary environment.

On April 20, Graywolf poet Leslie Adrienne Miller read as part of the Mentor Series. The video of that reading is below. This Friday, May 18, 2012 the 2011–12 Mentor Series concludes with a reading by 2012 Pulitzer Prize poet Tracy K. Smith at 7 p.m.

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Among the Loft’s many notable classes, events, and contests, the Mentor Series stands out, year after year, as an invaluable opportunity for emerging writers of prose and poetry to work with acclaimed authors and poets—several of whom, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith (who reads at the Loft on Friday, May 18), have gone on to win national awards and recognition during or shortly after their time as Loft Mentors. The Mentor Series is a fixture in Loft culture and the Twin Cities literary community—and none of it would be possible without the tireless efforts and ingenuity of the Loft’s Program Director, Jerod Santek.

Jerod has been at the Loft since 1994, when he joined the staff as the events coordinator. Much of his job then was “setting up chairs at the Pratt Community Center gym, which served as our performance hall.” As of 2000, Jerod has been Program Director at the Loft, overseeing the grant and award programs—among them, the Mentor Series. Recently, I was lucky enough to talk to Jerod and learn a bit more about the man behind the mentors and how he makes it all happen.

Over the years, several authors and poets who you have invited to participate in programs at the Loft have gone on to become well-known in the literary community. Could you give some highlights of past speakers?

There have been so many wonderful writers who have participated in our programs, both as judges and mentors and as award winners. I think the reputation of our programs is such that writers want to be a part of it. When I had asked Jane Hirshfield to serve as a poetry mentor in 1999, she replied, “Al Young [who had served as a fiction mentor in 1992] told me if I ever get an invitation from the Loft, take it. And I always do what Al Young tells me to do.” I hear different versions of that reply quite often. The reputation isn’t just the quality of the writers we bring in, it’s the quality of the writers who are here. Mentors and judges know that they are going to have extremely talented and dedicated writers to work with and, in the cases of judges, very difficult decisions to make.

On that same note, Tracy K. Smith, a mentor in this year’s Mentor Series and one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Poetry Conference, was just awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection, Life on Mars. What was it about her work that caught your attention?

I first heard Tracy read at the 2008 AWP conference in New York at an event sponsored by Graywolf Press. This was shortly after her second collection Duende was published. I very much appreciated not only her poetry but her stage presence and her way of engaging with audience, which often isn’t easy to do in hotel ballrooms. I learned from talking with others that she has that same presence in the classroom so I knew I wanted her to come as a poetry mentor. Luck would have it that this was the year that worked for her schedule and ours.

How do you go about selecting artists for programs at the Loft? What do you look for?                

It’s a combination of many factors. I rely a lot on recommendations from writers who have participated in our programs, both as mentors and as winners. I keep a list of their suggestions, along with names of writers I hear speak at conferences like the AWP conference. With the Mentor Series, I try to bring writers who are all different from each other, both aesthetically and professionally. I wouldn’t want, for example, all six mentors having tenure-track teaching positions in an MFA program. Nor would I want six mentors who all have similar styles of writing. It would make for a pretty boring program, especially for the emerging writers selected to participate. There are a lot of people who are wonderful writers but are not so good at teaching and mentoring up-and-coming writers. If mentoring isn’t their skill, I don’t want them in the Mentor Series, no matter how many awards their work may have received.

If you could wave a magic wand and have any living author or poet come and speak at the Loft, who would you choose?

That’s a really difficult question. There are so many writers I would love to have be at the Loft and only so many spots I can offer. That list of writers to invite never gets any shorter! For each person on that list that I’m able to bring to the program, at least a half dozen more names are added.

Marit Hanson is the Loft’s marketing and communications intern. Today is her last day at the Loft. Loft staff will miss her much, but know she is on to great things!