The interview has been posted at Wauktown Radio.
Haven Kimmel and author escort Bill Young at a recent Chicago appearance at Froggy’s Restaurant in Highwood, IL.
Indiana plays an important role in Haven Kimmel’s writing. The state inspired her poetry so much so that when she moved to North Carolina, she was without her Midwest focus and feared she would never write again.
Then Haven began writing stories of her growing up years in Mooreland, Indiana a tiny hamlet of 300 people in Henry County. The stories became two best selling memoirs, Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch.
Haven revisits Indiana again in her fiction The Solace of Leaving Early and Something Rising (Light and Swift). Her newest book, The Used World, forms a loose trilogy with the two novels.
As a poet, Haven received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency that supports artists and arts organizations.
The NEA website lists the categories they fund, although many deadlines have already passed. Visiting the site is a good first step in seeing their criteria and guidelines.
All government grants are listed online at www.grants.gov. Many grants are awarded to non profit organizations, but some individual artists are eligible.
Additional resources for grants for individuals include state art agencies or councils (for Illinois it is the Illinois Arts Council) and the Foundation Center.
One current RFP (grant speak for “request for proposals” or grant that is available to apply for) of interest to writers is the Puffin Foundation. The Foundation awards grants to “emerging artists in the fields of art, music, theater, dance, photography, and literature whose works due to their genre and/or social philosophy might have difficulty being aired.” Awards range from $1,000 to $2,500 each. Deadline is Dec. 30, 2007
