The Berkshire Lyric Chorus begins rehearsals for their annual spring masterworks concert
Pittsfield— On Monday, January 8th at 7:30 p.m., The Berkshire Lyric Chorus begins rehearsals for their annual spring masterworks concert, which will take place on June 2nd at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall featuring works by Bruckner, Brahms, and Arvo Part. The 100-voice chorus will be accompanied by an orchestra.
Rehearsals are on Monday evenings at 7:15 p.m. beginning on January 8th at the Pittsfield Unitarian Church on Wendell Avenue in Pittsfield. Interested new singers are admitted by audition. Please call Artistic Director Jack Brown at 413-298-5365 to schedule an audition appointment. Spring dues are $100 or free for Berkshire residents under the age of 25. More information can be found online.
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OLLI at Berkshire Community College winter course registration is open
Pittsfield— Registration is open for the OLLI at Berkshire Community College winter semester which runs January 22nd through March 4th.
Expand your mind with OLLI at BCC’s fascinating courses offered online via Zoom and/or in-person. There are no tests and no grades – just learning for the love of learning!
Registration is now open. A list of courses being offered can be found online. Course fees are $50 for one course, $95 for two or three, and $125 for four or more courses within a semester. Call 413-236-2190 to register. To sign up for courses, you need to be an OLLI at BCC member. Not a member yet? Become a member online.
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The Mount and Straw Dog Writers Guild announce the writers selected for the 2024 Residency for Emerging Writers
Lenox— The Mount and Western Massachusetts’ Straw Dog Writers Guild are thrilled to announce the nine writers selected for the 2024 Residency for Emerging Writers. Among the selected writers are a disability advocate, a Stanford lecturer, and a Signet Society poet. The 2024 residents will be working on developing their respective works at The Mount for one week each, between March 4th and March 22nd.
Submissions were reviewed anonymously and ranked based on quality of writing, originality of voice, and the potential for growth as a writer. The selected writers are:
Camila Sanmiguel Anaya is a Mexican-American poet born and raised on the southern border. She graduated from Harvard University in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts in History & Literature, taking workshops with Jorie Graham and Josh Bell. Sanmiguel Anaya was the 2017 National Student Poet for the Southwest—one of five students receiving the highest honor in the country for youth poets—and worked with young refugees and advocates for immigrant children as part of her service. She won second place in the 2023 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. She is an alumna of Harvard’s Signet Society, an artists’ society.
Eleanor Fuller recently completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to volunteer as a fiction reader on the editorial board at Prism International. She is the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and a finalist in The Fiddlehead’s 2023 fiction contest. Her stories appear in The Moth, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. Fuller’s work has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto.
Jason Prokowiew is a 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant winner for Literary Oral History for his braided memoir War Boys. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. His writing has appeared in Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, and on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, Monson Arts, and the Mass Cultural Council. He runs his law office dedicated to disability advocacy and lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband.
Jenn Alandy Trahan is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and where she currently teaches fiction, creative expression, and contemporary American short stories. Published in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories, Jenn’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation as well as by writing residencies in Laugarvatn and Las Vegas, through Gullkistan, The Writer’s Block, and Plympton, respectively. She lives in California with her spouse, daughter, and two dogs.
Julia Thacker’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and The New Republic. Twice a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th-anniversary issue of Poetry International. Her collection, “All the Flowers Are for Me” was a finalist in the 2023 National Poetry Series. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. Her work has been published in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Catapult, and elsewhere, and has received support from MASS MoCA, the Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Mariah’s prose chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle was published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press in 2023. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Writing about race, land, and kinship is Mistinguette Smith’s purpose and joy. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pluck!, Abandon Journal, the Black LGBT anthologies Does Your Mama Know, and Other Countries: Voices Rising. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories about the lives of one Black family during the uprisings for Civil Rights/Black Power, a love letter from the movements for racial justice in the mid-1960s to those of today. You can find her writing in Oberlin, Ohio, or at MistinguetteSmith.com.
Stevie Billow is a writer, educator, and creative organizer originally from rural Vermont. They hold a BA from Smith College and an MAT from the Universidad de Alcalá. Stevie is a 2023-2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at GrubStreet and the founder of Rotary Arts, an interdisciplinary arts collective for and by emerging LGBTQ+ creatives. Stevie’s writing has appeared in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Fauxmoir, The Blood Pudding, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, and elsewhere. You can find Stevie on Instagram @wollibs and at steviebillow.com.
Whitney Scharer is the author of “The Age of Light,” a national bestseller named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour, Real Simple, Booklist, and Yahoo. Internationally, “The Age of Light” won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and was published in over a dozen countries. Whitney is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship and has been awarded residencies at VCCA and Ragdale. She lives with her family in Arlington, Massachusetts where she is working on her second novel.
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Great Barrington Cultural Council announces 2024 grants
Great Barrington— The Great Barrington Cultural Council is pleased to announce it has awarded 19 grants to support a wide range of exceptional arts and cultural programs/events with awards ranging from $250 to $500 for a total of $7036.
Grants were awarded to the following:
- History Alive (Bernice Lewis)
- 2024 Fall Festival (Shakespeare & Company)
- Willie Was Different (Berkshire Music School)
- Dances of Africa (Berkshire Pulse)
- Blue Rider Circus Student Showcase (Blue Rider Stables)
- S-M-Art Lab (Flying Cloud Institute)
- Greenagers Education & Stewardship (Greenagers)
- Nutshell Playhouse at Pulse (Nutshell Playhouse)
- “TILL” (Triplex Cinema)
- Spring Teen Film Festival (Triplex Cinema)
- A Talk About The Universe (Costello Astronomy Lecture)
- Festival Latino (Festival Latino of the Berkshires)
- Hip Hop Chair Dance for Seniors (Music Dance Edu)
- Stitched Stories (Second Nature Arts)
- Stockbridge Sinfonia
- Take Me Out To Berkshire Baseball (Baseball in The Berkshires) Legacies Exhibit (Center for Peace and Culture)
- Berkshire Voices Reading Series (Great Barrington Public Theater)
- IS183 Professional Development for BHRSD Educators
This year’s grants reflect the vitality, quality, and diversity of our community. Applications for 2025 will be available in the fall. More information can be found online.
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Stockbridge Cultural Council announces 2024 grants
Stockbridge— The Stockbridge Cultural Council announced that it has awarded 32 grants ranging from $250 to $1,000 to support cultural programs in Stockbridge and the surrounding area.
Grants were approved for the following Stockbridge-based applicants and projects:
- Berkshire Garden Center, Inc./Rooted in Place
- Berkshire Pulse, Inc./Spirits of Chesterwood
- Chesterwood/Tableaux Vivant Workshop and Performance
- IS 183, Inc./Community Visual Arts Programming & Resources
- Rachel Nicholson/Science Heroes Interactive Program
- Olga Dunn Dance Company, Inc./Nutcracker Seedling and More
- Neil Silverblatt/Voices of Poetry–In Stockbridge
- Stockbridge Housing Authority/Resident Services Coordinator Media Arts Classes
- Stockbridge Library Association/Stockbridge Ice Festival
- The Laurel Hill Association of Stockbridge/Laurel Hill Day
- The Norman Rockwell Museum, Inc./Mohican Interpretive Panel
- Town of Stockbridge/COA Lecture and Arts Series
- Natalie Tyler/Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood
- Terry Wise/Mohican Artist Exhibit at Stockbridge Library
In addition, the Stockbridge Cultural Council provided funding for the following projects that it believes benefit the Stockbridge and Berkshires cultural community:
- Beehive Media LLC/Bearing Witness: Stories of Resilience
- Berkshire Bach Society, Inc./Messiah Sing
- Berkshire Children’s Chorus, Inc./The Sounds of Music
- Berkshire Music School, Inc./Willie was Different: A Musical Enrichment Program
- Berkshire South Regional Community Center/Berkshire Ukulele Band and Berkshire Sings!
- Berkshire Theatre Group, Inc./BTG PLAYS! School Residency Program
- Center for Peace Through Culture/Legacies
- Edith Wharton Restoration, Inc./Nightwood
- Flying Cloud Institute, Inc./S.M.Art Lab: Where Science Meets Art
- Great Barrington Public Theater, Inc./Berkshire Voices 2024 Reading Series
- Greenagers, Inc./Climate Action–Environmental Education
- Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School/Cows
- Rebel Town Productions/Rebel Town (The Boston Tea Party Musical)
- Shakespeare & Company, Inc./2024 Fall Festival of Shakespeare
- The Stockbridge Sinfonia, Inc./The Stockbridge Sinfonia: Intergenerational Community Orchestra of the Berkshires
- Triplex Cinema, Inc./Triplex Saturday Morning Kids’ Series
- Triplex Cinema, Inc./Spring Teen Film Festival
- WAM Theatre, Inc./WAM Theatre’s 2024 Community Engagement Program
Decisions about which projects to support are made at the community level by a board of municipally appointed volunteers. The Stockbridge Cultural Council will seek grant applications again in the fall. More information can be found online.
