Professor Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Hoa Nguyen ’91 Receive Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists

They’re among four poets internationally to receive the award.

By Chloe Kim

Two UMD luminaries are among a select group of four poets awarded 2024 Grants to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, associate professor of English and director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing, and Hoa Nguyen ’91, assistant professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, both received the award.

In total, 23 artists from around the world received the awards in disciplines including visual arts, dance, music and sound, and performance art and theater. The $45,000 awards are unrestricted, and “intended to provide recipients with the financial means to engage in whatever artistic endeavors they wish to pursue.”

Bertram is an artist and poet who uses innovative techniques such as computation and artificial intelligence to write about themes such as race, gender and embodiment. They are the author of five books, including “Negative Money” and “Travesty Generator,” both written using algorithms and computer programming. “Negative Money” explores themes of race, gender, debt and love through a range of poetic styles and was called "profound” by Publishers Weekly. “Travesty Generator” received the Poetry Society of America’s Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work in 2020 and was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.
 

Nguyen is a writer and educator internationally recognized for her contributions to poetry. Her books include “Red Juice: Poems 1998 - 2008” and the Griffin Prize-nominated “Violet Energy Ingots.” Her most recent book, “A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure,” was a finalist for a 2021 National Book Award, the 2021 General Governor’s Literary Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. While a psychology major at UMD, Nguyen’s close relationship with Professor Emeritus Michael Collier and her poetry workshop with the late Professor Emeritus Rod Jellema were “formative” to her development as a young writer. After UMD, she went on to pursue her M.F.A. at the New College of California.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts chooses grant recipients from a pool of peer-selected nominees. Nominated artists do not apply themselves, and winners are only informed after they have been awarded the grant.

“It’s very special that someone thought enough of my work to nominate me and that the committee was able to see the work and understand the trajectory of my career,” Bertram said. “It means a lot that there are people out there who get what I’m trying to do.”

Nguyen highlighted that one of the most invaluable aspects of the grant’s financial support is the gift of time.

“With this grant, I can allocate the necessary time to travel, carry out a study of place and archive, and write. It will provide space for me to work and expand on a poetry manuscript in progress,” Nguyen said.

Image credit: Still from a video version of the poem "It took me all those years to remember who I was and why,” written by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram in conversation with GPT2, a Large Language Model (LLM).