By Avery Samuels

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Elissa Washuta has been announced as a recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award for a brave personal project that is forthcoming this year. Creative Capital’s website describes the collection, titled White Magic, as “a personal essay collection about heartbreak, sexual violation, and the artist’s process of becoming a powerful witch. Surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, Elissa Washuta learns to embrace the spirit powers and desperation witchery of her dispossessed and discarded Cowlitz, Cascade, and Appalachian ancestors.”

Recipients of this award will receive up to $50,000 in project funding, supplemented by an additional $50,000 in career development services. The projects that received awards along with White Magic are based in fifteen different states and territories, “from New York to California, Puerto Rico to Washington,” according to the Creative Capital press release. “Over 60 percent of the artists identify as women, and 77 percent as people of color. They span a range of genres, including literature, performance, the visual arts, moving image, technology, and socially engaged art, but what they all share in common is a conviction in the power of art and the importance of pushing boundaries.”