Wintergreen Women Writers Collective awarded $750,000 from the Mellon Foundation.
Wintergreen Women Writers Collective, with our fiscal sponsor Educopia, is thrilled to announce an award in the amount of $750,000 from the Mellon Foundation. This grant will support our implementation-focused project, “The Women Gather: Building a Network to Embrace Black Women Writers”.
“The Women Gather” will build on lessons from Wintergreen’s previous Mellon-funded “Sacred Work” planning project, enabling us to strengthen our operational capacity in support of our mission and activities beyond the term of the implementation grant; continue to document the stories of Black women writers; establish our archives and ongoing records schedule in continued partnership with James Madison University Libraries; pilot two new strategic partnerships with mission-aligned organizations, Torch Literary Arts and Cita Press; organize and host a series of in-person and virtual convenings that bring the stories of the Wintergreen Women to new audiences; and support a graduate student research fellow to publish new research highlighting creative lineages of Black women writers.
Our Executive Director, Dr. Joanne Gabbin, says, “This is an exciting chapter in the life of our 38-year-old organization as we fulfill our mission to encourage, document, and preserve the work of Black women writers. Mellon’s generous grant will allow us to dream big and make real our achievement of this sacred work.”
“The Women Gather” revolves around Black women writers’ claiming time for creative work. Wintergreen aims to build a network of excellence to embrace Black women writers and ensure that the reach and impact of Wintergreen Women are preserved and made accessible for generations to come. All of these efforts are in direct alignment with key elements of Mellon’s Public Knowledge program—including the preservation of the cultural and scholarly record that documents society’s complex, intertwined humanity. We are deeply grateful for Mellon’s continued generosity and trust.
“The Women Gather” will be led by Wintergreen Executive Director and Principal Investigator, Dr. Joanne Gabbin, who will be supported by Wintergreen Women and Board Members that are uniquely qualified to advance diverse streams of the proposed work: Alysia Dempsey, Opal Moore, Dr. Nikki Giovanni, Dr. Daryl Dance, Dr. Trudier Harris, Dr. Maryemma Graham, Dr. Sandra Govan, and Dr. Tyechia Thompson. Collective members will be supported by Jessica Meyerson (Educopia Co-Director and Wintergreen Organizational Development Consultant), Aloma Antao (Educopia Marketing & Communications Manager and Wintergreen Strategic Communications and Marketing Consultant, and Caitlin Birch (JMU Libraries Director of Digital Scholarship & Distinctive Collections). Throughout “Sacred Work”, our partnership with Educopia and JMU proved invaluable in helping us develop the capacities and infrastructure needed to support our implementation activities. We look forward to continuing to explore new ideas and grow in thought partnership with them.
Finally, we would like to thank members of Wintergreen’s Board, as well as every single Wintergreen woman (past, present, and future) who has walked with us to create structural “footprints” into the worlds of education, publishing, and archival collections—helping to make dissemination of the Collective’s knowledge inevitable and historical erasure impossible.
