HARTFORD— A Newtown resident is among the artists awarded an Artist Fellowship grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts for Fiscal Year 2019.

Brian Clements was named on April 11 as one of 50 artists to be awarded an Artist Fellowship grant.

A Professor of Writing, Linguistics, and Creative Process at Western Connecticut State University, Dr Clements was named a $3,000 awardee.

The COA Artist Fellowship program provides competitive grants to encourage the continuing development of Connecticut artists. The grants provide support for artists to pursue new work and achieve specific creative and career goals. Three grants are available: $5,000 Artistic Excellence, $3,000 Artistic Fellowship, and $1,000 Emerging Recognition.

Dr Clements is one of 30 state artists to be awarded an Artist Fellowship this year. Ten Artistic Excellence Awards and an equal number of Emerging Recognition Awards were also announced April 11.

Dr Clements was the founding coordinator of the university’s MFA Creative & Professional Writing program. He told The Newtown Bee on April 11 that he plans to donate at least part of his grant to support young writers at the university.

“We have awards for the undergraduate students here, so I’ll probably donate some of the money to support that,” he said.

Other funds from the COA grant, he added, will be used to continue traveling around the country to support discussions about gun violence, through the lens of poetry.

The author or editor of 15 print and digital collections of poetry, Dr Clements was the co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond To Gun Violence. The anthology, published in December 2017, is a collection of 54 poems that paired poets with citizens and their responses to gun violence.

“We’ve been traveling around the country, continuing that discussion in local communities,” Dr Clements said.

Recipients of the COA Artist Fellowship Program will receive recognition, the funding support, and professional development opportunities as part of their award.

According to the state agency, applicants are assembled into “manageable review groups with peer panel reviewers assessing and scoring applications.” A secondary panel is then convened to review top scoring applicants.

The primary review criteria for applicants is artistic excellence and how the award would impact the artistic career of the artist. The Artistic Fellowship Program is not a project grant program.

COA fellowship awards are “particularly competitive,” according to the agency’s application. Artists are encouraged to apply only when they have created a substantial body of recent work that can be presented professionally.

Dr Clements acknowledged the competition, saying Connecticut “is a state that is very rich in writing talent. I’m very lucky to be recognized this way, and I’m very grateful for it.”