The April Freely Award for Black Queer Poets
April Freely photographed by Felicita “Felli” Maynard for the 2020 Community Portrait Project.
Queer|Art seeks a generous and visionary donor to help establish a new award for Black queer poets in honor of April Freely, a Fellow of the 2021 Queer|Art Mentorship program.
April’s death, due to underlying health issues, occurred unexpectedly in the middle of her fellowship year with Queer|Art and tragically cut short, at age 39, a promising future as a brilliant poet and essayist, community leader, caregiver, and supportive friend to many fellow artists.
To inquire further about supporting The April Freely Grant for Black Queer Poets, please contact Dani Brito, Awards Manager at dbrito@queer-art.org.
“April went deeper, right to the heart of the matter, and wrote about grief as she was experiencing it. I was in awe of her poems and her fortitude.”
–QAM Mentor Saeed Jones
The late poet, essayist, and organizer, April Freely (1982 - 2021) was a brilliant writer and a magnetic force in her artist communities. During her Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellowship with us, she had been working with writer Saeed Jones on a poetry manuscript about her experiences caregiving as a queer Black woman within a broken US healthcare system. The text was an intimate exploration of illness as a queering of the body. Before her death, April spent over six years caring after her ill mother through organ transplants and multiple cancer diagnoses.
She noted that queer community had taught her lessons about the long-term physical labor of care and in her weariness of Black women needing to play every resilient role, the importance of self-care. When her mother died in 2021, April continued to write. As Saeed Jones reflects, “April went deeper, right to the heart of the matter, and wrote about grief as she was experiencing it. I was in awe of her poems and her fortitude.”
Writer and 2020–2021 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellow Erica Cardwell echoes this sentiment: “plainly said, I was so deeply impressed with her writing, and often found myself hoping to reach even an ounce of her talent. We were both writing about our mothers, but her capacity to convey the present tense is something I have never been able to achieve. Like many astounding poets, April’s skill for craft relied on a deep and fertile instinct.”
April Freely discusses her writing philosophy in an interview for Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, 2018.
We are seeking support to create an award in April’s honor, to help carry forward the promise of her vision, to empower Black queer poets and provide them with community, financial support, and ample space and time to rest, reset, become inspired, and, as they wish, create new work without distraction.
Our hope is to find a generous and visionary donor or group of donors who will help us launch The April Freely Award for Black Queer Poets in 2023 with an initial five-year annual commitment.
The Queer|Art Awards initiative has awarded $202,000 to 29 artists across six grants and prize programs since 2017. The awards program recognizes and celebrates significant contributions to queer culture, providing direct financial support and professional development resources for projects and practices in specific areas of film, photography, and dance, as well as broader recognition for lifetime achievements in artistic work and mentorship.
The April Freely Award for Black Queer Poets would annually award:
$10,000 to a self-identified Black queer poet to recognize their existing body of work and provide critical support towards their creative practice.
$1,250 each to four distinguished finalists.
A sample budget is attached in the full proposal at this link. We look forward to collaborating with a donor or donors further to shape the grant in accordance with available resources.
April’s presence, talent, and generosity of spirit are deeply missed by all of us here at Queer|Art. An award in her memory would contribute significantly to fulfilling the expansive promise of her legacy.
April Restless (2017) by Jennifer Packer.
“What I want a poem to
do is build a landscape in an environment of feeling–
a land of perception.
As a Black queer woman, taking over the page and putting the reader in a location that I create
is important to me.”
–April Freely
April Freely Appointed Executive Director of FIAR | ARTFORUM
April Freely on Creative Resilience in the Face of Hardship | Art in America
Hysteria | Folder Magazine
Selected Poems | The Georgia Review
GET YOUR LITTLE NARROW BEHIND UP THAT HILL, OR — I AM MY MOTHER’S VERY OWN BLACK GIRL MAGIC | Foundry
Run Down | The American Poetry Review
“April Freely in Herman Aguirre’s Studio” | Fine Arts Work Center
Every Verb is a Lesson in Longing or Dread | Poets.org