Hey all!

Recently I was accepted for residency at Vermont Studio Center in the spring of '23. I'm so excited to be accepted, following in the footsteps of many writers and artists I admire who have also been. Currently, the funds required are beyond my reach. I'm reaching out and asking for community support financially or just giving this post a share or boost. I'm currently revising my manuscript Ruined Splendor and working on another collection of poems exploring the mother wound, addiction, class, and debt.

One of the most valuable support tools a writer can have is space and time. Receiving this residency allows me to foster a practice that serves the work best. I plan to use my time to focus on completing the project by generating poems needed to suture the collections together and complete an ordering process. I will also spend the time strengthening my scholarly knowledge, which will be valuable to my poetics and pedagogical approach. I hope to bring an energy to the residency that other artists will benefit from and a desire to share in a mutual exchange of inspiration and artistic endeavors. For more information on my manuscript and my work, please continue reading below or visit https://www.darewilliams.com

Ruined Splendor is a collection of poems exploring both the ruin and the splendor of queer identity and life. My speaker wanders between two generations; one that was obliterated and devastated by HIV/AIDS and one who is farther away from those histories but still wrestling with the continued impact it has on our communities. As a result, many of us are left untethered to our past, rituals, and maps.

I’m interested in exploring where I am as a queer pre-Prep HIV-positive person inhabiting the hallways between these two spaces. The poems attempt to examine the landscape of ruin emotionally and of place while also seeking out the splendor, to reconcile that violence and grief are all around us, not only presently but tapping us on the shoulder from our past. The poems also explore our relationships by meditating on love, grief, addiction, and violence resulting from loss and fatherless-ness. As a community wrestling with absence from parents, destruction from addiction, and violence enacted upon us by the state and how we treat each other, the poems ask: is it possible to create a new future without forgetting? How do we coexist amongst the beautiful and the terrible? How do we practice the most honest form of love, where we can hold each other accountable and bear witness to the vulnerability within the pain?

The format of the book will be in sections. Section one is Ruin, poems exploring the ruin of self, relationships, and place. The middle will be an experimental burning haibun erasure. The last section will be Splendor, poems attempting to reconcile the past and envision new paths and new futures while holding intergenerational history close.

In Gratitude,

Dare