Description
The Outpost Foundation seeks to foster the development of rural hubs for Black creative life and writers of color in the tradition of artist enclaves. Situated on thirty acres of private property in the mountains of Southern Vermont, the Outpost Foundation is an arts advocacy organization for emerging BIPOC writers from the United States and Latin America. Their mission to identify and support artists of color in the early stages of their careers aligns with Luce’s priorities of nurturing knowledge communities by fostering dialogue, enriching public discourse, and amplifying diverse voices while expanding our commonly accepted understanding of “knowledge” and “communities.”
Outpost Foundation’s governing ethos is directly informed by the communities of care that have historically sustained Black creative life. Launched in 2022, their flagship is the Outpost Fellows-in-Residence program, which awards two authors a $2,000 stipend along with travel, lodging, and meals during the month of their residency in September. In addition to this time dedicated to the cultivation of a generative writing community, fellows receive mentorship from literary professionals (editors, agents, and authors) and engage in events organized with the local community of local universities and bookstores ti share their work and expand their networks. As compared to arts residencies across the country today that require a level of financial security in advance of participation, this fellowship provides a setting for and financial support for the processes of artists of color to be valued. Outpost’s immediate goals are 1) to boost the current financial award for their flagship residency, 2) invite alumni back to share new works with universities and bookstores throughout the state, and 3) initiate targeted public relations campaigns to raise the Foundation’s profile so that it will be a more effective stepping-stone for authors connected to it. Since its inception, Outpost has supported emerging writers that have gone on to receive the National Book Award, accepted positions as the Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and signed book contracts with DIAGRAM, Essay Press, Lookout Books, and Grove Atlantic. Two forward-thinking, prestige literary journals, The Common and The Offing , have supported Outpost from the beginning and authors continue to have their work spotlighted in their pages.
A guiding example for Outpost comes from the work of Anne Spencer, a poet connected to the Harlem Renaissance and the first African American woman to have work published in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry . Spencer’s home in Lynchburg, Virginia replete with gardens, artistic nourishment, and psychic safety served as a refuge for black intellectuals, artists, and activists making their way South. Outpost is committed to modeling this extraordinary example of fostering vibrant artist of color communities. This grant would support Outpost in their work to similarly establish the peer networks and environments of care that make such social spaces not only possible, but joyful to inhabit. This facilitation of connections to and participation in the surrounding communities aligns with the DEPT program goals of enhancing community participation for geographically and socially specific groups. By centering the arts as a central feature of community and social organization, Outpost is also aligned with DEPT’s guiding ethos that artists and other cultural creatives have significant contributions to make towards deepening civic engagement and civic life, towards the imagining of new and preferable democratic worlds.
