Sourced From: Arts Midwest
The NEA Big Read has extended their deadlines until January 17th, 2024! This extended deadline is for intent to apply. Full applications are still due on January 24th, 2024.
The National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with Arts Midwest, offers grants ranging from $5000 to $20000 to organizations such as libraries, universities, museums, school districts and tribal governments. The grant supports community reading programs that are designed around a single NEA Big Read book.
The Big Read aims to “inspire meaningful conversations, celebrate local creativity, elevate a wide variety of voices and perspectives, and build stronger connections in each community”.
The 2024-2025 program will explore the theme Where We Live. The NEA Big Read Library will provide 50 titles that draw from a wide range of connections to this theme. These books create connections to community through history, culture, people, environment and even alternate realities.
Each grant recipient will receive funding for the books and the resources to help the program succeed. These programs vary in length and scope. Participating organizations will facilitate discussions of the book, and can choose to host/invite the author for a visit, create panel discussions or art exhibitions, include theatrical performances or writing workshops and overall create enriching community events surrounding the theme of Where We Live.
Ron Rash’s Burning Bright has made the list for the Big Read. This collection of Appalachian stories offers unique prose and perspective of the ways of life in the Appalachian mountains, making for a great selection for this year’s Big Read theme.
In Burning Bright, Ron Rash, captures the eerie beauty and stark violence of Appalachia through the lives of unforgettable characters. With this masterful collection of stories that span the Civil War to the present day, Rash, a supremely talented writer who “recalls both John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy” (The New Yorker), solidifies his reputation as a major contemporary American literary artist.
Ron Rash is a New York Times best-selling author of short fiction, poetry and many award-winning novels. Hailed as “one of the great American authors at work today” (New York Times), Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena, in addition to The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. His books have been published in 21 countries.
