Your humble narrator was awarded a Residential Fellowship for July 2026 at the Clyfford Still Museum. Here was my pitch video:

As noted in the video (did you watch it?) I first became aware of the legendary Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still via Michael McClure, who moved to San Francisco to study painting with him. Still had left San Francisco two years earlier, so Michael ended up studying poetry with Robert Duncan. I’ll link to the official museum announcement below. I have investigated this subject somewhat before in an April 2015 interview with curator Patricia Failing. 

Residencies and retreats are tricky business. The ante goes up when you set out to write and they are higher when you have a specific goal or subject in mind, but given that the residency falls during Poetry Postcard season, given that I continue to write 17 syllable poems every day and that I have developed a practice of writing daysongs, I have a good feeling about my month in the Mile High City. If you are in, or near, Denver, let us have a cup of hōjicha tea. (I have again quit drinking coffee, though no one told my stress levels.)

I have tried to wean myself away from depending on outside validation to measure my worth as a poet, but I have to tell you that this opportunity, and the unfettered access to the whole museum (one of the best of its kind in the world) has given me a little high. My gratitude goes out to the museum, the selection committee and my references, including Andrew Schelling and Jason Wirth.

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A committee selected six Fellows from different study areas to engage with the Museum and its collections from July 1 to 31, 2026, as the third cohort of the Clyfford Still Museum Institute Residential Fellowship Program in Denver, CO. The program focuses on three pillars of study: art, education, and social enterprise. The 2026 Fellows include: ​​Lamees Rahman and Martha Tuttle in Studio Art; Paul E. Nelson in Art Writing; Jon M. Wargo, PhD, in Early Childhood Education; and Kathryn Graddy and Michael White in Social Enterprise. READ MORE.