The Amy Clampitt Residency Program

with Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation

The Amy Clampitt Fund seeks to benefit poetry and the literary arts, having converted Amy Clampitt’s residence into a facility that provides “a place to foster the study and promotion of poetry and/or a poet in residence.”

Learn more at Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation

First-hand experience, poems and podcasts of our previous residents:

Jessica Piazza

Tyree Daye

Cody Walker

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Katrina Vandenberg

GRANT GUIDELINES

WHO CAN APPLY

Application opens May 1, 2024. Deadline June 15, 2024. The first 50 applications will be accepted for review by the committee.

Learn more about the applications process at Berkshire Taconic Foundation

GRANT INFORMATION

The Amy Clampitt Fund seeks to “benefit poetry and the literary arts by converting Amy Clampitt’s prior residence into a facility which would provide for a place to foster the study and promotion of poetry and/or a poet in residence” through 6-to-12 month residencies at the Amy Clampitt house near Lenox, Massachusetts.

Amy Clampitt was born and brought up in New Providence, Iowa, graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Kingfisher, published in 1983, was followed in 1985 by What the Light Was Like, in 1987 by Archaic Figure, and in 1990 by Westward. A Silence Opens, her last book, appeared in 1994.

The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, she was made a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992. She purchased a small house in Lenox with part of the award and lived there briefly. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Writer in Residence at the College of William and Mary, Visiting Writer at Amherst College, and Grace Hazard Conkling Visiting Writer at Smith College. Ms. Clampitt died in September 1994. Her husband, Harold Korn, died in March 2001. It is his estate that has established the Amy Clampitt Fund.

A recent broadcast of NPR's "Morning Edition" featured Amy Clampitt's story. Listen to it here!