River Grabowski, an instructor and MFA candidate in creative nonfiction writing at Colorado State University, has been named as the 2024 SunLit Writer-in-Residence on the Eastern Plains, marking the second writer to take part in the program under the banner of The Colorado Sun.
The residency supports a recipient who spends a week exploring creativity in a rural setting over the summer. Grabowski will spend that week working and engaging with the community in and around the town of Joes, which sits about two hours east of Denver and a half-hour south of Yuma in northeastern Colorado.
The Colorado Sun has partnered with the Prairie Sea Projects arts initiative to support the residency and will contribute an honorarium to help defray incidental expenses. Camille Dungy, award-winning author and director of the creative writing program at CSU, supervised this year’s selection process.
“I spent half my childhood in a rural part of north Idaho and have since spent most of my time in urban environments,” Grabowski said, “so I am happy to write at a rural pace and to listen to the land in a different way.”
The inaugural recipient, Anita Mumm, who was selected by the MFA in Nature Writing program at Western Colorado University, described a rewarding experience during her time living in a century-old home while working on a variety of writing projects.
“If your time in Joes is anything like mine,” Mumm wrote in an open letter to her successor, “you’ll come away with a deep sense of the creative rewards to be found in ‘getting away from it all,’ and in the opportunity to connect deeply with a unique landscape and community.”
Grabowski is a queer essayist and poet particularly interested in “working at the intersection of poetry, essay, cyanotype imaging, and collage that samples local flora and other ecological material—garbage, ephemera, found language, etc.—to explore the relationships between a queer body and a rural plains environment.”
In addition to teaching and working on an MFA, Grabowski serves as an editorial assistant at the Colorado Review, the university’s literary journal. Prior to arriving at CSU, Grabowski was a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and worked as a Spanish-English literary translator in Querétaro, México.
The SunLit residency adds to the ongoing work of the Prairie Sea Projects, which focuses on wide ranging rural creativity in forms from writing to music, film and even biodiverse gardening. The program receives support from the nonprofit Prairie Cultural Commons, which creates opportunities, equity, and understanding for High Plains communities through arts and culture.
Program co-director Maureen Hearty welcomed Grabowski to the program and hopes the experience can be as fulfilling as it was for Mumm.
“Anita had a very successful experience in Joes where not only did she find inspiration from the landscape and people for her own writing, but she inspired the community with a well attended creative writing workshop on ‘Writing the Non-Human,’” Hearty said of the SunLit residency, which comes under the umbrella of The Alma Creative Residency program at Prairie Futures, which includes one-week stays from May through August.
She added that Mumm’s work, along with other acclaimed writers including Teague von Bohlen and Claire Boyles, will be featured in a book, “The Alma Journal: Volume 1,” published later this year by local independent publishing house Daisy Dog Press. The creative residency will be expanding as a result of interest from people “looking for ecological connection in the raw beauty and isolation of the rural prairie.”
Readers can subscribe to the Prairie Sea Projects newsletter at prairieseaprojects.org.
Future participants in the SunLit residency also will be selected in conjunction with MFA programs at Colorado colleges. MFA programs interested in participating can contact SunLit editor Kevin Simpson at kevin@coloradosun.com.