World Literature Today Receives Grants from the Norman Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts

September 14, 2022
by  WLT

Photographs of Jessica Karis Ray and Marie Casmir with branding from the Neustadt Lit Fest. Text reads: 2022 Neustadt Lit Fest. Black and Blue: Dance Film Premiere

World Literature Today is proud to be the recipient of two grants in support of the 2022 Neustadt Lit Fest: a Norman Arts Council Arts Program Support Grant and an NEA American Rescue Plan Sub-Grant. Both grants will help make possible, in part, the dance film based on Boubacar Boris Diop’s prose poem “Black and Blues,” featuring artistic direction and choreography by Marie Casimir, artistic coordination by Jessica Karis Ray, and performances by Vitoria Correia and Nate Tylor. The film will have its world premiere on October 26, 2022, during the last day of the lit fest, and will be livestreamed on the festival’s Zoom platform (click here to register). The entire lit fest is free and open to the public.

In January 2022, the NEA announced awards of $57,750,000 in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding “to 567 arts organizations to help the arts and cultural sector recover from the pandemic.” As part of the NEA’s mission to celebrate America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, sub-grant recipients are asked to remind their constituencies that Constitution Day occurs every year on September 17. Accordingly, we encourage all our readers to visit the Library of Congress’s education and resources page to commemorate the date in 1787 when the US Founding Fathers signed the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification.

At the University of Oklahoma, the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage is “an interdisciplinary center for the study of American constitutionalism” that “reflects [a] broad approach to the Constitution in all its aspects: its philosophical underpinnings, its historical context, its legal substance, and its contemporary relevance.”

WLT is also honored to be the recipient of recent American Rescue Plan grants from the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.