Here's another post by Kelley Coyner, a regular contributor here at First Person Plural. Last week she described her experiences at the Compleat Biographer Conference. Today she provides some helpful tips, gleaned from conference panels, on how to fund your work.
Insights from the recent Compleat Biographer Conference (iFAQs? Infrequently (provided) Answers (to your) Questions.)
iFAQ 1: Where can independent scholars find funds for nonfiction, especially biography?
Louise Knight, author of 2 biographies of Jane Addams, highlighted the National Endowment for Humanities for projects related to American History. The deadline for their summer stipend to individuals for 2012 is September 29, 2011.
The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, awards fellowships nonfiction and, according to Andre Bernard, Guggenheim’s V.P, they typically fund 2 to 4 biographers a year. Deadline: September 1.
Leslie Brody (Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford) promoted the creative use of residencies and travel grants to fund research and time to write (Editor’s note: The Poets and Writers website list residencies for nonfiction writers. Mira’s List is more ad hoc but includes finds such as the Margolis Award at Blue Mountain Center. Next Deadline: July 1.)
iFAQ 2: How do I find other grants?
The panelists and audience said “Head to the library” and look for the five inch thick Directory of Foundations, a list of most foundations which provide financial assistance to individuals through fellowships, residencies, and travel programs.” Better yet, head to the local Foundation Center, Washington’s is on K Street, or to one of dozens of locations across the country for free access to Online Foundation Grants to Individuals.
iFAQ 3: How do I persuade an anonymous review panel to fund me?
There is money for the asking, but you have to ask well. Knight and Bernard stressed the three keys to success:Follow the directions especially with respect to eligibility. Tailor your proposal to the culture of the group. And don’t get discouraged. Follow the directions. Knight—a winner of NEH grants, a reviewer of applications to NEH, and a former research funding specialist at a university, recommends reading and following the grant guidance closely. If you cannot meet the requisites, don’t submit. Flag additional optional criteria and try to meet those as they may tip the scales in deciding to fund you versus another worthy applicant. (KC Comment: As a reader of many proposals, I can tell you many proposers omit the most basic information. Others hold out the hope the requisites will be waived in their special case. I have never seen that happen.)
Tailor your proposal. The Guggenheim’s Bernard said that the personal narrative is critical to show what is interesting about the topic and demonstrate the person’s ability to write. Don’t send your editor or relatives as references; do list people who know your writing.
The personal narrative appears to be the places where applicants most frequently stall in preparing the process. Now that all applications are completed online, online applications, the Guggenheim Foundation can monitor who opens, but does not complete the application and where the candidate stopped. (Bernard recently pulled a fiction application from decades ago which had a very sketchy notion of a former basketball player in a small town in Pennsylvania, some poems, and an interesting and well written personal narrative. Updike got the fellowship. And in 2010 Adam Begley was granted a fellowship to work on Updike’s biography With no previous biography under his belt, it looks like Begley persuaded the adjudicators on the basis of his narrative and topic of interest.) Don’t get discouraged.
Should I ask why my proposal was turned down? Yes. No. Maybe. How many times is too many times to apply?
The Guggenheim Foundation will not tell you why you did not receive a fellowship, because often there is often no helpful reason. They received more than three thousand applications last year and awarded 180 grants. Many good ones just did not get the nod. NEH does provide a debrief on applications. With other funders, it does not hurt to ask.
If at first you don’t succeed, apply, apply again. The Guggenhiem Foundation made an award recently to someone who had applied more than 40 times. (But don’t apply to Guggenheim again if you have been a Fellow in the past. See, Follow the directions.)
Kelley Coyner’s nonfiction writing includes The Viva List Latin America: 333 Places and Experiences People Love (contributing writer and editor), and articles in Americas, Mothering, Library Sparks, and Comet magazine. She served as the (nonfiction) Writer in Residence at the American school in LaPaz. (By day she writes strategic plans, policy briefs and blog posts for public policy blogs.)
Showing posts with label KC's Corner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KC's Corner. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
KC's Corner: KC at the Compleat Biographer's Conference
by Kelley Coyner (who's an FPP regular. She writes about nonfiction).
The ride up the elevator to the National Press Club was my last quiet moment at the recent Second Annual Compleat Biographer's Conference hosted by BIO: the Biographers International Organization. From the registration desk forward the whole conference buzzed with energizing exchanges in the panel sessions and in the halls, over book signings, at lunch, and in the First Amendment Lounge and the elevator down. The 200 participants including many TWC members were almost all biographers. These participants include practicing biographers have published and those who working on biographies – in every medium, from print to film. The mix of practicing biographers than 60 presenters resulted in a concentrated day of learning about the art and ethics of writing biography, tools to sustain writers, and technology for research and promotion of books and authors. (The presenter included practicing biographers, book reviewers and editors, publishers, agents, documentarians, an NPR station president, and foundation directors.
At first, I felt like a pretender. The standard conversation opener was “what is your project?” I would answer somewhat tentatively, “I am not a biographer, but a blogger.” Soon I found a toehold and felt like we were holding impromptu workshops on blogging in the halls, while we waited for a session to begin and over lunch. Why should biographers? What should they post about? How should they organize their blog? How can a biographer build an audience for their blog? Should biographers post as guests on other blogs. (Answer: Clearly yes and would you like to do a guest post on First Person Plural.)
There were four flights of panels each with four workshops held from morning to late afternoon. I attended four sessions plus a presentation by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Caro focused on how he learned about his a subject’s by gaining a sense of places that person lived and worked. In particular, Caro told how he walked and rewalked LBJ’s path to his Capitol Hill office from his boarding house by Union Station trying to gain an understanding of why the then young hill staffer ran the last leg of his daily commute. The cold of winter was not an adequate explanation; LBJ ran it every day. Finally he made the walk at sunrise when LBJ would have made the walk. And then he saw how the marble of the Capitol’s façade beamed like gold in the reflected light. Andrea Pitzer Neiman Story Board captures Caro’s remarks more fully in her post The Power of Place on the Neiman Story Board.
I attended four sessions: Book Reviewers Address Biography, Writing for Young Adults; The Art of Interviewing; and Funding Your Work. The rooms were a neutral press room blue--- but the writers presenting gave a strong sense. Expect to see more on these sessions including a report on the bird’s eye view into the “bookroom” at the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post and the Washington Independent Review of Books (not only do they publish online they only read electronic galleys). The next KC’s Corner will highlight funding opportunities for nonfiction writers including biographers. (Be sure to send any suggestions or questions you have on that topic.)
By the way, I did not participate in speed dating with literary agents. I also had to exit before the interview and reception with Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra.
Past, present and future for the Compleat Biographer Conference. BIO held its first conference at University of Massachetts. If you want to attend that conference virtually, tune into the videos on the BIO website. James McGrath Morris promised that a recording of Robert Caro’s presentation and video consolidating clips from the conference will soon be available.
Next year in in Los Angeles! For more information participating in BIOs conference on the West Coast in 2012, James McGrath Morris, who in addition to serving as the executive director of BIO is also author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power.
In the meantime, I have some writers I need to follow up with on guest blogging on FFP. If you would like to do a guest blog on biography or another nonfiction topic let me know. I am particularly interested in flash interviews of TWC members. Post a comment here or drop me at note at coyner.kelley at gmail.com.
The ride up the elevator to the National Press Club was my last quiet moment at the recent Second Annual Compleat Biographer's Conference hosted by BIO: the Biographers International Organization. From the registration desk forward the whole conference buzzed with energizing exchanges in the panel sessions and in the halls, over book signings, at lunch, and in the First Amendment Lounge and the elevator down. The 200 participants including many TWC members were almost all biographers. These participants include practicing biographers have published and those who working on biographies – in every medium, from print to film. The mix of practicing biographers than 60 presenters resulted in a concentrated day of learning about the art and ethics of writing biography, tools to sustain writers, and technology for research and promotion of books and authors. (The presenter included practicing biographers, book reviewers and editors, publishers, agents, documentarians, an NPR station president, and foundation directors.
At first, I felt like a pretender. The standard conversation opener was “what is your project?” I would answer somewhat tentatively, “I am not a biographer, but a blogger.” Soon I found a toehold and felt like we were holding impromptu workshops on blogging in the halls, while we waited for a session to begin and over lunch. Why should biographers? What should they post about? How should they organize their blog? How can a biographer build an audience for their blog? Should biographers post as guests on other blogs. (Answer: Clearly yes and would you like to do a guest post on First Person Plural.)
There were four flights of panels each with four workshops held from morning to late afternoon. I attended four sessions plus a presentation by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Caro focused on how he learned about his a subject’s by gaining a sense of places that person lived and worked. In particular, Caro told how he walked and rewalked LBJ’s path to his Capitol Hill office from his boarding house by Union Station trying to gain an understanding of why the then young hill staffer ran the last leg of his daily commute. The cold of winter was not an adequate explanation; LBJ ran it every day. Finally he made the walk at sunrise when LBJ would have made the walk. And then he saw how the marble of the Capitol’s façade beamed like gold in the reflected light. Andrea Pitzer Neiman Story Board captures Caro’s remarks more fully in her post The Power of Place on the Neiman Story Board.
I attended four sessions: Book Reviewers Address Biography, Writing for Young Adults; The Art of Interviewing; and Funding Your Work. The rooms were a neutral press room blue--- but the writers presenting gave a strong sense. Expect to see more on these sessions including a report on the bird’s eye view into the “bookroom” at the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post and the Washington Independent Review of Books (not only do they publish online they only read electronic galleys). The next KC’s Corner will highlight funding opportunities for nonfiction writers including biographers. (Be sure to send any suggestions or questions you have on that topic.)
By the way, I did not participate in speed dating with literary agents. I also had to exit before the interview and reception with Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra.
Past, present and future for the Compleat Biographer Conference. BIO held its first conference at University of Massachetts. If you want to attend that conference virtually, tune into the videos on the BIO website. James McGrath Morris promised that a recording of Robert Caro’s presentation and video consolidating clips from the conference will soon be available.
Next year in in Los Angeles! For more information participating in BIOs conference on the West Coast in 2012, James McGrath Morris, who in addition to serving as the executive director of BIO is also author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power.
In the meantime, I have some writers I need to follow up with on guest blogging on FFP. If you would like to do a guest blog on biography or another nonfiction topic let me know. I am particularly interested in flash interviews of TWC members. Post a comment here or drop me at note at coyner.kelley at gmail.com.
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