To download a PDF of the 2005 Camp Application
and Financial Status Form, click here.

THE NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION
SUMMER WRITING CAMP 2005
July 7 - 15
Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont

RE: Call for Applications
FROM: Meg Kearney, Associate Director, the National Book Foundation
Date: November, 2004

The National Book Foundation is pleased to announce that we will be sponsoring our 12th annual Summer Writing Camp from Thursday, July 7 -- Friday, July 15, 2005, on the campus of Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

Forty-eight students, age 14 and up, will be selected to participate in this unique, inter-generational program. The Foundation is looking for responsible, highly motivated and mature individuals who have a keen interest in writing and reading, and who would appreciate and benefit from this experience. They must have demonstrated proficiency in reading and writing in English.

The Foundation will cover the following expenses: transportation between our office in Manhattan and the Camp, accommodations, meals, workshop fees, and any required reading and writing materials. If you live outside New York City and are concerned about transportation to New York, scholarship money may be available.

This year's camp will feature four writers-in-residence during the nine-day program, who will introduce participants to a wide range of literary experiences and encourage them to pursue personal writing projects. (See information on our Writers-in-Residence.) Other authors will be making guest appearances.

Prior to the Camp, participants will receive personal copies of books by these authors as well as other titles. In addition, participants will be required to attend at least three literary events, and to keep journals (to be provided) in which they will document their responses to the books they have read and the events they attend.

Students of all ages work intensely during their time at Camp, spending 12 workshop hours with one poet, and another 12 hours with a fiction writer on the faculty. One day is also devoted to working with both a nonfiction writer and a playwright or screenwriter. While participants arrive at Camp with pre-assigned poems and fiction pieces in hand, much of the emphasis centers around the creation of new work and revision. Students should expect their work to be discussed and critiqued in the daily workshops; positive criticism and a healthy commitment to improving one's writing and revision skills is emphasized.

Anyone interested in participating must complete an application form, including the required writing samples and letters of recommendation, and a Financial Information Form. You may photocopy the forms as necessary for distribution.

Applications cannot be accepted without writing samples or Financial Information Forms. Writing samples will not be returned; please make sure you keep a copy. Our fax number is (212) 213-6570. If you fax your application, please also mail us the original.

Students who have attended our Writing Camp in previous years are still required to send a complete application (writing sample, essay, and application form), but do not need to provide letters of recommendation.

All applications must be postmarked no later than Tuesday, February 22, 2005.
The February 21 postmark deadline has been changed because of President's Day.

Applications should be mailed to:

Meg Kearney, Camp Director
The National Book Foundation
Summer Writing Camp 2005
95 Madison Avenue, Suite 709
New York, N.Y. 10016

If you have any questions, please call Sherrie Young, Maryann Jacob, Meredith Andrews, or Meg Kearney at (212) 685-0261.

The 2005 Summer Writing Camp is made possible through leadership funding from the Theodore H. Barth Foundation, Perseus Books Group, and Borders Books & Music, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MeadWestVaco, Courier Corporation, Bruno Quinson, Alberto and Gioietta Vitale, Martin and Deborah Bernstein, Katherine Paterson, Lawrence Bergreen, Arthur Thornhill, Lutz & Carr, Yolanda Moses, and New Amsterdam Entertainment. The New York State Council for the Arts supports the Camp’s off-season workshops.

To download a PDF of the 2005 Camp Application
and Financial Status Form, click here.

Cornelius Eady is a playwright and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently Brutal Imagination, which was a Finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry. Among his other honors, Eady has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. His work has appeared in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets and In Search of Color Everywhere. He has taught writing and English at New York University, S.U.N.Y.- Stony Brook, Sarah Lawrence, William & Mary, Sweet Briar, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and George Washington University, as well as at Bread Loaf, Squaw Valley, and New York's West Side Y and 92nd Street Y. In 1997, the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan presented a theatrical adaptation of his book, You Don't Miss Your Water. In April 1999, Running Man, a music-theater piece co-written with jazz musician Diedre Murray was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and awarded a 1999 Obie for best musical score and lead actor in a musical. His play adaptation of Brutal Imagination was the winner of an Oppie Award in 2002. With poet Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. He is currently on the faculty of American University in Washington, D.C.

Poet Kimiko Hahn's most recent book of poems, The Artist's Daughter, was published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2002. She is also the author of Air Pocket (Hanging Loose Press, 1989); Earshot (HLP, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; Volatile (HLP, 1998); and Mosquito, Ant (W.W. Norton, 1999). In 1995, Kimiko wrote ten portraits of women for a two-hour HBO special titled Ain't Nuthin' But a She-Thing. She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Kimiko is a Professor in the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York.

National Book Award author Norma Fox Mazer has published 28 books, including an anthology of poetry, two collections of her own short stories, and three novels written with her husband, the writer Harry Mazer, as well as numerous articles and essays, and a dozen original short stories for various anthologies. Her books often appear on the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults list. Many of her stories have been reprinted and anthologized, and her books have been published throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Notable Children's Book (two-time recipient), the Christopher Award, Newbery Honor Book, Horn Book Fanfare, Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (two-time recipient), Iowa Teen Choice (two-time recipient), and the California Young Reader's Medal. Her novel When She Was Good was named a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, as well as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and one of Barnes & Nobles 10 Best Young Adult Books of 1997. Most recently, her young adult novel Girlhearts was published by HarperCollins in 2001.

Jacqueline Woodson is a two-time National Book Award Finalist: her novel Hush was a Finalist for Young People's Literature in 2002; and Locomotion, poems written in the voice of an 11-year-old boy, was a Finalist for the Award in 2003. Jackie is the author of a number of books for children, young adults and adults, including If You Come Softly, I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, The House You Pass on the Way, From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, and Autobiography of a Family Photo. Her picture books include The Other Side; Sweet, Sweet Memory; We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past; and Our Gracie Aunt. Her picture book The Other Side has won many awards, including the Texas Blue Bonnet Award and a Child Magazine Best Book Award. Jackie is currently working on a novel for adults, Grail, NY. She has received several awards, including three Coretta Scott King Honors, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, two Jane Addams Peace Awards, three Lambda Literary Awards, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, a Granta Best Writer Under Forty Award, Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 1994, and a number of American Library Association Best Book Awards. Her video, "Among Good Christian People," a collaborative with Catherine Saalfield, received an American Film Institute Award. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook Retreat Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

To download a PDF of the 2005 Camp Application
and Financial Status Form, click here.