Jared Green, Donald Judson, and Craig Watson will each receive $25,000, no-strings-attached;  among the largest grants in the nation for artists

Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson were both dedicated to the arts all their lives. Mrs. Johnson, who died in 1990, earned a degree in creative writing from Roger Williams College when she was 70. Mr. Johnson invented a new process for mixing metals in jewelry-making and then retired to become a fulltime painter.

Before he passed away in 1999, Johnson began negotiating with The Rhode Island Foundation to design what has become a $1.2 million artists fellowship program in music composition, literature, and visual arts, offering among the highest no-strings awards in the nation, for Rhode Island-based artists.

The Foundation announced today the first three MacColl Johnson Fellows in Writing: author and professor Jared Green of Providence; poet and writer Donald Judson of Providence; and poet Craig Watson of Jamestown. Each will receive $25,000 over the next 12 months to use as they see fit.

Awards to visual artists will be made in 2007 and musicians in 2008.

Fellowships will “free time and resources for the creative process”
“The most precious commodity a society can offer to its artists is ‘time’,” emphasizes Foundation Program Officer Claude Elliott, who administered the second year’s selection of MacColl Johnson Fellows.

“All three writers were clear that the fellowships will buy them time. Two of them are yearlong educators, for example, who would welcome time off from grading student compositions in favor of their own.”

The three were chosen from 137 writers of fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and playwriting. Three out-of-state writers judged the first round:

• Ian Pounds, author and Literary Prize Coordinator, Bakeless Prize, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College,
• Gary Lundy, poet and professor at the University of Montana-Dillon,
• M. Cochise Anderson, playwright and performing artist, Minneapolis.

The final review panel consisted of:

• LeAnne Howe, film producer, writer, scholar, and educator, is the John & Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi,
• Timothy Liu, poet and professor, is the author of six books of poetry and editor of Word of Mouth: an Anthology of Gay American Poetry,
• Justin Tussing, a fiction writer, has published his first novel, “The Best People in the World”, and has been published in The New Yorker, Third Coast, Shankpainter, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.

Green pursues academic career, writing simultaneously
Jared Frederic Green balances a careful life between professorship and writing. A Ph.D. from Brown University in Comparative Literature, he has taught at several universities, most recently as Assistant Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Stonehill College in Massachusetts.

Green has under his belt articles such as “We Victorian Others: Urban Ethnography, Commodity Culture, and the Occidental Africa,” and “Brutal Communities: Speech, Misrecognition and the Disciplining of Race,” but is trying to complete his first novel, “Static”, in the midst of both a growing family and an academic career.

“…[P]rofessional obligations have kept me from advancing my fiction – and this novel in particular – in a sustained, focused manner for nearly a decade. The MacColl Johnson Fellowship [would obviate] the need to take on the additional seminars, summer courses and intersession teaching with which I must regularly supplement my salary. This, in turn, would allow me to set aside the substantial amount of time typically spent preparing lectures, teaching in the classroom, grading papers, and meeting with students.”

One of the reviewers wrote, “If were were charged with identifying promising, emerging artists, then he would be a clear favorite. There are leaps and fancy here unmatched.”

Judson seeks to finish promising novel
 Donald Judson is a native Rhode Islander, where he finished college, but emerged from a Florida prison “wanting to turn my life around.” With a clear gift for writing, he attended the MFA Program at Brown University and began successfully publishing his works. But his poetry, writing, and life reflect the reality of the struggling artist.

“I soon began placing short fiction in literary journals and in 1996 published a novel, “Bird-Self Accumulated”, that won the Bobst Emerging Fiction award. I began a new novel. A very short section from an early draft won a Howard Foundation Award, but soon after I became ill…I’d love to finish the novel – I need to finish it – and a MacColl Johnson Fellowship will make that possible. I struggle to find money to live, juggling jobs and dealing with my disability. The Fellowship means time to write.”

Wrote one reviewer, “The sentences are spare, and yet their juxtaposition is the drama, slowly, one after another, surging forward in a stream of nouns and verbs. One can feast upon the lovely syntactical oscillation of repetitions and variations, moving poetically as prose.”

Watson is a “new literary voice that is writing against the grain”
Poet Craig Watson has divided much of his adult life among theatre, writing, and…corporate America. After management positions with the Hartford Stage Company and Rites and Reason Theater, Watson spent more than 11 years, many as vice president, with GTECH Corp., a global, government-services technology company. He left in 1997 for his current position, as Literary Manager for Trinity Repertory Company, as well as various lectureships.
 The common thread throughout his life, since age 14, he told the Providence Journal, has been poetry. As a result, his Vitae reflects 11 books and chapbooks, four anthologies, innumerable poetry journals, and several essays and criticisms. With co-editor and publisher Michael Gizzi, Watson also directs QUA Books, which publishes high-quality editions of poetry and art criticism.
 Watson repeats the refrain of his fellow awardees: “Unlike most other artists, writers need little formal equipment or instrumentation. The material of writing, however, is experience, imagination and language. Like all writers, the condition that will best enable new writing is time free from the daily exigencies of earned income and dictated schedules. This fellowship would offer a significant period of time (at least four months) during which I would be able to pursue and develop new work.”

One reviewer wrote, “Full of ideas that could rescue the imagination during these corrupt imperial times. The most ethical agenda of all the works.

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The Rhode Island Foundation was established in 1916 as one of the nation’s first “community foundations,” a unique form of philanthropy that connects a region’s philanthropists with its pressing issues. The Foundation distributed more than $20 million in 2005 to more than one thousand nonprofits.