Macdowell Medal Day 2016 Special

2016 MEDAL DAY Michael Chabon Reflects On This Hard American Dream 3 Peter Sellars Talks About the Triumph of Fine-Ness 6 Toni Morrison Describes How She Began to Be a Writer 9

Toni Morrison 57TH EDWARD MACDOWELL MEDALIST CELEBRATED ON GLORIOUS MEDAL DAY

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sk any person crowded into the packed Medal Day tent on August 14, 2016 what stood out for them as Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison arrived to receive the 57th Edward MacDowell Medal, and they might tell you there was a palpable electricity in the air that seemed to move from body to body in the damp summer heat as though grounding itself in each heart that beat in anticipation. When Morrison moved up on to the stage, the arts lovers in attendance, within and crowded around the outside of the tent, burst into thunderous applause and rose to their feet. The ovation lasted until Morrison took her place between Michael Chabon and stage, opera, and music festival director Peter Sellars, both of whom looked as jubilant as the mood reflected by the overflow crowd.

Chabon admitted as much as he welcomed the nearly 2,400 people who attended Medal Day when he said, “The energy in the tent as we came in was exactly what I was hoping for when I was a fiveyear-old Chairman of the Board aspiring someday to be standing up here on this podium next to this literary Goddess.” The crowd responded with both laughter and approval, and reacted in kind to each of the ceremony’s speakers, culminating with Peter Sellars’ pointed and rousing introduction of the Medalist, and Morrison’s final inspiring story about becoming a writer.

We hope the following pages offer a glimpse of this free public event featuring a picnic lunch and an afternoon of self-guided tours of open studios on the Colony’s 450 wooded acres. The afternoon offers a rare perennial peek at the work being created by today’s leading contemporary artists.

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Working for This Hard American Dream TRANSCRIPT: MICHAEL CHABON REFLECTS ON MORTALITY AND MAKING ART As a boy in the days of Vietnam and Watergate I considered myself a patriot—anti-war, anti-Nixon, but a patriot—and I believed in the American Dream.

I don’t know exactly how I would have defined the word “patriot” at the time I was five, six, or seven years old. Some kind of compound of my love for the Constitution, for the “I Have A Dream” speech, for county fairs, Squanto, baseball, Johnny Appleseed, Harriet Tubman, the space program, the sound of Pete Seeger’s voice, and the way I used to get teary every time I read about the death of Abe Lincoln’s young son, Willie, during the darkest moments of the Civil War. Then I got older, and Ronald Reagan happened, and I looked around at the people who were calling themselves patriots and I was like, Gag me, which is something we used to say at the time. I lost my illusions.

I wised up. I started to think that the American Dream was just a PR campaign to get people to max out their credit cards and that Squanto was a sap who ought to have let the Pilgrims starve. I still loved my country, but increasingly that feeling was something akin to “tough love.” You could love America, I thought, without believing its lies or being satisfied by its excuses. You could sniff its breath and check its pockets and hold it accountable for its misdeeds without ever denying or repudiating its place in your heart.

The problem with living with skepticism like that,

Author and Chairman Michael Chabon welcomes an overflow crowd to the Medal Day festivities.

I’m talking about the hard American Dream.... The American Dream that is celebrated and dismantled, torn and patched back together again, over and over, in the novels of Toni Morrison.

Architect Max Kuo talks about his work with a visitor in Heinz Studio.

constant skepticism, is that over time it may begin to off-gas cynicism, which deposits around the heart like ice. You start to look, reflexively, for the story behind the story, the power behind the power, the money that underlies everything, and you are forced to conclusions like “wars are really about oil,” “policy is written by lobbyists,” etc. Cynicism is like that luminescent spray they use on cop-show crime scenes; the hotel room looks all nice and clean, but hit the UV light and you see the bloodstains glowing everywhere. I’m not saying cynicism is unwarranted; those bloodstains really are there. But that layer of ice around your heart can in time begin to feel awfully cold.

For me, the election of 2008—the candidacy and victory of Barack Hussein Obama—broke open the carapace of ice. I heard echoes of Lincoln and Dr. King.

I threw myself into the campaign to get the man elected, and on Election Night I danced in Grant Park with my little daughter on my shoulders, and I was saying, Please, Rosie, never forget this night. And then a few months later, at the inauguration, Pete Seeger sang. And he was wearing a really silly hat.

My admiration for our president has not cooled, but I confess that since then cynicism has definitely returned to renew its wintry grip. The inequities of wealth and class are so grotesque, the hypocrisies so brazen, the profit margins on hate and fear so abominably fat.

But, people, I have to tell you, standing up here, with this great American writer, looking around at this great American place—the ice is cracking.

So, let’s take a few minutes to ponder the American Dream.

Now, you might look at the extraordinary journey of a young girl named Chloe Wofford, who was born in a small industrial city on the Ohio shore of Lake Erie, where her mother was an Alabama-born domestic worker and her father was a Georgia-born sharecroppers’ son turned shipyard welder, and who grew into this MACDOWELL MEDAL DAY 2016 3

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extraordinary genius: the capacious mind, adventuresome heart and incomparable gift for language known collectively as Toni Morrison, and you might think, Well, duh: American Dream. The promise of equal opportunity, right? Of an equal shot at material prosperity, upward social mobility, a better life for one’s children?

That’s not the American Dream! Or, well, maybe it is, but that’s the easy American dream. I’m talking about the hard American Dream. The deep, lonely, strange American Dream. The American Dream that is celebrated and dismantled, torn and patched back together again, over and over, in the novels of Toni Morrison.

This hard American Dream was the Dream of a hundred-odd English Dissenters huddled and stormbeset in a leaky boat on the Atlantic, bearing for a place where they hoped to be able, without interference, to worship their angry God in their peculiar way. It was the Dream of Huck and Jim adrift on the Mississippi, with no other wish in their hearts but to keep on floating, the sole citizens of their pine plank republic of equality, harmony and freedom. It was the Dream of Henry David Thoreau going into the woods, Brigham Young sighting the shores of the Great Salt Lake, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson doing his dreaming and scheming “in my room.”

And it’s the Dream that recurs, with inexhaustible variation, in Toni Morrison’s novels, each one a novel of community in isolation, of towns or neighborhoods or 4 MACDOWELL MEDAL DAY 2016

So much of the work created over the years at MacDowell, and by artists strongly associated with the MacDowell Colony, has helped to shape, powerfully and lastingly, our idea of America and America’s idea of itself.

Clockwise from top left: Presentation speaker and theatre director Peter Sellars, Executive Director Cheryl A. Young, Resident Director David Macy, President Susan Davenport Austin, Medalist and author Toni Morrison, and author Michael Chabon gather before the ceremony.

houses that are planets unto themselves, vibrant, violent, precarious, wobbling uncertainly between utopia and dystopia, between self-selection and ghettoization. It’s the Dream of the denizens of the tautly circumscribed yet deeply layered urban enclaves she depicts in The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in the literally isolated Caribbean compound of Tar Baby, and even, perverted— the American Nightmare—in the lush hell known so cruelly, in Beloved, as Sweet Home. And it’s the Dream of the one hundred and fifty-eight black freedmen in Paradise (a novel replete with would-be utopias), who arrive in Oklahoma after a long, hard migration across the south to found the all-black town of Haven.

The American Dream: the unassuageable desire of a small group of oddballs to be left, at long last, in peace.

Sound like any place you know?

Everything you see around you today, every road, every studio you will visit, all the picnic baskets—every novel that has been written and painting painted and sonata scored, is the miraculous fruit of the resolve of one woman to ensure that one man might be left, at long last, in peace.

For years Marian MacDowell had devoted herself

to fostering and supporting her husband Edward’s work as a composer. She had labored tirelessly to smooth his creative path, to fend off the importunities, personal and economic, of academic and everyday life. When he died, she was left with the modest income from his musical compositions, four hundred acres of pristine woods and farmland here, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a question: what to do with the rest of her life?

The key weapon in Mrs. MacDowell’s constant battle to see that Edward found some peace had been their summers here at Hillcrest, as the farmstead was originally known, and in particular a small, simple but comfortable studio which she’d had built for him in the woods. A cabin in the woods had worked for Thoreau, and it had worked for Edward MacDowell. Now, as Mrs. MacDowell recorded in a letter to poet Edward Arlington Robinson, I’m gonna see if the idea is scalable. I made that up, she didn’t actually say that.

It was, and they came, those American Dreamers, and do you know what they did? They dreamed America. So much of the work created over the years at MacDowell, and by artists strongly associated with the MacDowell Colony, has helped to shape, powerfully and lastingly, our idea of America and America’s idea of itself.

Thornton Wilder in Our Town, Stephen Vincent Benet in The Devil and Daniel Webster, Dorothy and Dubose Heyward in Porgy and Bess, Willa Cather (My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop), James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son, Blues for Mister Charlie), Aaron Copland (Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring), Leonard Bernstein (On the Town, West Side Story): these are the artists and the works that helped define the way we think about New England, New York City, the Deep South, the Prairie,

Top: A visitor to Nef Studio examines the work of photographer Bill Jacobson.

Below: Picnickers enjoy lunch after the ceremony.

the Southwest, the Far West.

So think of that, and look around you at the fruit of Mrs. MacDowell’s dream: Thirty-two beautiful studios, serving over three hundred artists a year: painters, novelists, composers, photographers, choreographers, sculptors, filmmakers, and poets. They come from all over the world now. They show up on the doorstep of Bond Hall, children of that deep, hard dream: to be left in peace among others of their strange and lonely kind. And every day Blake Tewksbury tiptoes up to their studio doors, with their lunches each packed into a picnic basket. He leaves the baskets on the doorsteps, and tiptoes away again.

Is that the American Dream? I don’t know. But it sounds pretty dreamy, doesn’t it?

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The Triumph of Fine-Ness

Introductory Speaker Peter Sellars

TRANSCRIPT: PETER SELLARS INTRODUCES TONI MORRISON AS A WRITER WHO SAYS DIFFICULT THINGS IN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SENTENCES EVER WRITTEN. Hey fantastic people, nice to be here! Wow! Just a little warm in New England today, but OK, I’m sure some divine breeze is on its way. Yes! Meanwhile, may I just say it’s so moving to be here surrounded by this zone of creativity and beauty in the woods, and intelligent people in one large tent, thank you.

Just to say, what’s thrilling about talking about Toni is that—obviously she needs no introduction—but I would like you to remember what it was when she won the Nobel Prize. You know, lots of people win the Nobel Prize all the time, and some of them are intelligent. You know, we read about them in the newspaper on Monday, and we say oh OK, good, good, good. But when Toni won there was worldwide elation. People all over the world felt they had won the Nobel Prize.

And for me that’s all you hope for from an author, is somebody who we love, but somebody who in loving them we actually feel recognized, and feel that someone has spoken, finally, words we couldn’t form at a time we couldn’t stand up and speak, words that needed to be said. And you know there’s a lot of smart writing and clever stuff going on, but not that much writing where you feel you won the prize. Where you feel you needed this book to go through the next week

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The stakes are the facts of Black Lives Matter.

Arts lovers leave Eastman and Firth studios after getting a look at the projects underway within.

and the next year of your life. Where you feel some giant truth, which has never been uttered aloud in public, finally resonates across the planet. Done, not crudely, but with wisdom and sheer skill. Just sheer skill. Beauty of craft—sentence after sentence, saying difficult things in the most beautiful sentences ever written.

And to see this woman stand at the Swedish royal palace in front of the king and queen and express herself with such poise and such power and such utter clarity for the world, may I just say it was a great day for the Nobel Prize.

Because in Toni’s work, the stakes are high. It’s not ‘Oh, I like I like that book, but I didn’t like that book.’

The stakes are the facts of Black Lives Matter. The stakes are who fills the prison population, who’s not allowed to own their own home, who’s – I mean you could go on on that list, which lets you know that rhetoric of equality is so treacherous as to be evil at this point. Where the justice system itself now constitutes a crime against humanity.

How do you cut through that? How do you cut through this big established self-congratulatory monstrosity? And what does it mean, more powerfully, that juries can’t convict from Rodney King to Freddie Gray. What’s the problem? We have the video, we have evidence, we have a destroyed human being. Why are we not able to get any conviction on any of these cases? What is the jury’s problem with seeing a human being having been hurt? This is why in Toni’s books the stakes are high. Can we talk about Black America as human but also as having a real history, a deep his-

tory, a deep history that will not be glossed over, that cannot be glossed over, and a deep future.

Toni moves not in the manner of a court system through the forensics. Her system is called divination and prophesy. How do you come up with the stats on people whose history was never ever, ever recorded? You need to go deep. You need to go deep and you need to look into a human being deeply enough that you begin to know who the parents were. You need to find a very, very deep way to listen and be with a human being so you look in their eyes and you see their past. And you look in their eyes and see their future. And the reason all these characters agree to be in Toni Morrison’s novels is they know someone will look at them fairly.

Someone will be interested in who they actually are and what they really think they’re doing and what they’re struggling with, and what they are trying to achieve.

And who they really wanted to be, and they know that someone is actually going to listen to them and finally let them speak.

Now the powerful thing of course, we call these lives which we know from books like Isabel Wilkerson, and so on, when you realize what the struggles have been of black people just to do simple and normal things, what I think the Buddhists call spiritual heroes, just because it took something super human in order to be human. You had to reach way above and beyond yourself, and way deep into yourself because you don’t have stuff. Everything you are is what you are carrying with you at this moment. And all the people who made it or didn’t make it, who are still inside you. All the ghosts of the undead and the unborn, who you are carrying with you. You own nothing but those ghosts. And every minute of every day you are improvising brilliantly. Brilliantly. Improvisation after improvisation.

And in the case of Toni Morrsion’s literature that takes the form of that brilliant African and African-American tradition, which is formal playfulness.

She’s not telling the story the way you read it in the newspaper. The story is formally dazzling. There’s a bunch of stuff she’s not going to say. There’s a bunch of stuff that goes unmentioned. And a bunch of unmentionable stuff that is mentioned. She is enjoying her riff and as you’re reading her book you say, oh my God, that sentence is for clarinet. That sentence is for saxophone.

That sentence is an entire percussion battery. You say that sentence could only be written by a great dancer, the way it moves, lifts, spins, turns, dazzles you and is cool and sexy. It is genius to take what would normally be a sad story and create an occasion for joy, celebration, miraculous amazement, and your breath taken away, and then

As you’re reading her book you say, oh my God, that sentence is for clarinet. That sentence is for saxophone.That sentence is an entire percussion battery. ... It’s genius to take what would normally be a sad story and create an occasion for joy, celebration, miraculous amazement....

Michael Chabon and Toni Morrison share a laugh during the introductory remarks on Medal Day.

the space is left for you to meditate on your own life.

Hello, that is pretty overwhelming. Toni has addressed the gap in our histories, in our stories, and in our selves.

All that missing material that we don’t know how to tell ourselves, or admit to, or that we’ve deliberately forgotten. And the force of amnesia is so intense these days ... how do you push back and say: We didn’t make this stuff up, this happened. Well, you have to express it in a way that’s so vivid that it can never be erased again. And you have to express it, not with a fist, because every act of violence becomes its own self destruction. So you have to express it with just sheer elegance, delicacy, fineness, and I think if Toni Morrison stands for anything it is the triumph of fine-ness. How fine can a human being be?

Very fine.

And we respond to these books so deeply because we’ve all lost something. Something we know, something our mother told us, and we know what’s right and we know what’s wrong, and we’re still participating in what’s wrong, and we’ve lost that crucial part of ourselves, every day, every day, when we don’t just stand up and do what should have been done a long time ago.

So we read Toni’s books so personally because, in fact, in Toni’s books we actually find that lost part of ourselves that we thought we didn’t know how to talk to anymore, and we say, ‘Oh right, we do know how to talk to that part of ourselves,’ and that part of ourselves is still talking to us. And now, she’s given us the example. Let’s go out there and create a future as beautiful and fine and radiant and deep as the future we’ve already imagined. n

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Author Toni Morrison greets the crowd on the occasion of accepting the 57th Edward MacDowell Medal in the Arts.

I Will Tell You How I Began to Be a Writer TRANSCRIPT: THE 57TH EDWARD MACDOWELL MEDALIST EXPLAINS THE GENESIS OF HER FIRST NOVEL, THE BLUEST EYE. Thank you. Well, I think I should go home. After Michael’s speech and Peter and Susan, it’s all been said.

And they had suggested that I say a few words and I thought about it and I did some research, and I think I wrote three sentences that were of interest to me, and then I thought, ‘I don’t think so.’ I had no idea that the best speeches would be already given, but now I am truly at a loss for words, so I will tell you something else. I will tell you how I began to be a writer.

I was a reader. I learned to read when I was very young. Three years old. It was very special because in my family there were stories about my grandfather who had, as it was told, every holiday he read the Bible through five times. We were very proud of that, but we knew, particularly my parents, that there were decades when African Americans were unable to read because they were not allowed to read. And when they said school it always came with quotation marks because they were in little alleys, or fields, or under trees, and the grandfather of Bible reading power reputedly went to one of those schools one day in order to tell the teacher that he wouldn’t be back because he would have to rely on his sister to teach him to read and apparently she did.

Later on I began to wonder, why was he reading the Bible five times? And then it occurred to me, that’s the only book they had. There were no book stores, there was no buy-it, and they weren’t teaching them anything.

They had to teach themselves. So, learning to read, knowing how to read, buying books. My mother joined the Literary Guild (buying club) so it was very important and they took it for granted, and they insisted and they gave us space. So I was a very early reader and had assumed that everything that needed to be written was, and I would have access to it and read it.

I got a job with the help of my older sister at the library, you know, pushing the little catalog and stopping and reading so much that they wanted to fire me. They thought, ‘well maybe not’ so they moved me to the catalog department, which was fine, and so that kind of real life for me was working with books, reading books, reading them many times, etc. And then, life. I got a job teaching, baby, something else. You know, life.

I was invited to go to a writing club in Washington, D.C. where a group of amateur writers, and some were well-known, met once a month. And I was invited for reasons I don’t remember, but I went and they had

I realize that there is some book that nobody has ever written and I am determined to read it. So the only way I can read it, is I have to write it.

Medalist Toni Morrison tells the crowd how she got started on her writing career.

the best food you could imagine. They really put out a spread. So I was very enchanted with that. So I brought a little essay that I had written as an undergraduate, or something, and they said, ‘uh huh, uh huh.’ And then it became clear that I could not get any more food if I didn’t have something new.

So I was home and I was thinking, ‘what am I going to write and what do I know?’ My oldest son was just walking, and hanging on my shoulder, as kids do as you know, they’re always somewhere pulling on your leg or standing on their heads, and I was trying to think of what I could write. And then I remembered an incident from my childhood that I remembered very carefully and what it meant, not just what happened, but what it meant. And then I began to write, and it became The Bluest Eye. But while I was writing—I remember this more than I remember the book—while I was writing, and I write with a pencil and legal pads, my son is doing something over here and then he spits up some orange juice or something right on my manuscript, and I, being a writer, wrote around it.

It was so clear. I can always get rid of a stain, just wipe it up. But that sentence might not come back. So I got really interested in it. It took me several years to finish that book because—you know, I was teaching and children, and husbands, and whatever, and it was just the thing that you do, even now, after how many books, did you say? Eleven? No. A lot. I’m aged and as you can see I’m not so adept at running around.

But the thing that is really true and has always been true, and I didn’t know how important it was, is my imaginative mind ... that is as brilliant and sparkly and interesting as it has ever been. I think it’s more so.

After all that reading in my childhood, teenage years, undergraduate, graduate, and then I get this invitation to go to this writers group, and I realize that there is some book that nobody has ever written and I am determined to read it. So the only way I can read it, is I have to write it.

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2016 MEDAL DAY I have to say I thought it was a wonderful book, but it was sort of outside the mainstream, which I wasn’t even thinking about. It was a story. I knew a child who was my best friend and we had an argument in my hometown of Lorraine, Ohio. And she said there was no God, and I said there was, and we had a little quarrel.

But she had proof and I didn’t. Her proof was—I think we were about 11 years old—and her proof was that she had been praying for blue eyes for two years and he never gave them to her. That took care of him, right? But the point is, I remember looking at her. I turned my face and looked at her and she was coal black, and I thought she would look horrible with blue eyes. It just stunned me and then the second thing I thought was how beautiful she was. That’s not a word we use as kids: beauty. We say cute sometimes, but there was this face: these almondshaped eyes, these high cheekbones, exquisite lips. I mean it was amazing! I was struck by it, and that she needed to be somebody else.

So when I write something that I thought should be read it was that kernel because I was thinking, ‘yeah, how did she get like that? Who told her she needed blue eyes? Why did she think that? And if she did, whoever taught her? However, it was destructive and we, meaning the other children, bullied her and had probably helped make her want some other look. That’s how The Bluest Eye got started, and I have to tell you, the first time I sent it out to be published to a publisher or an agent, or one

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Who told her she needed blue eyes? Why did she think that?

And if she did, whoever taught her?

A long-standing tradition during the annual public Medal Day festivities is a picnic lunch after the ceremony. In the background, our new solar array produces 75 percent of our electrical needs.

of those people, I got a nice little note back that said, ‘Thank you very much, but this novel has no beginning, no middle and no end.’ That’s called a stopper. Usually you say ‘OK.’ But I had a very aggressive family who didn’t listen to people when they were on to something, so I sent it other places—12 I think—and all of them said, ‘Not bad, and thanks a lot, but no thanks.’ And then finally somebody at Holt said, OK. I think it was because something had been written—Manchild in the Promised Land—so it was sort of up. You could probably make a dollar or two if you published something written by a black person, so this guy at Holt took it.

When I finished the book and was sending it around I was working at a publishing house in Syracuse, and Random House bought that little house and so I moved to New York. But I didn’t want them to know I had a book published, because I’m an editor, that’s different.

If they think I’m being a writer, it’s like, no don’t do that. But of course they found out and offered me a job either at Random House or above, at Knopf. And Knopf was the gold medal of publishing so I went upstairs to see and I talked to a man who ran Knopf at that time, Robert Gottlieb, and he said, ‘I don’t want to be your boss because I have to be able to fire you, but I really would like to be your editor.’ And he has been ever since.

Thank you. n

Toni Morrison

Edward MacDowell Medal Awarded Annually Since 1960 The Edward MacDowell Medal is a national award presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to our culture. Since 1960, Medal Day has brought to New Hampshire some of the most influential artists of our time, including Leonard Bernstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, I.M. Pei, John Updike, Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, and Sonny Rollins. A complete list of past Medal winners is available on our website at macdowellcolony.org/ events-MedalDay-History.html.

An independent committee of peers selects the Medalist. Next August, The Edward MacDowell Medal will be awarded to an artist working in film.

Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, editor, and professor known for writing novels that explore the American experience through the lenses of race, sex, and power with vast themes, rich dialogue, and finely drawn characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and A Mercy.

“If any writer could be called our nation’s conscience, that writer would be Toni Morrison,” said best-selling author Dave Eggers, chair of the Edward MacDowell Medal Selection Panel, and editor and founder of the literary publishing house McSweeney’s. “And though she was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1993, since then she has continued to produce novels of astonishing power and beauty. She once said, ‘If you can’t find the book you want to read, you must write it,’ and that urgency is evident in every line and every book that bears her name.”

Serving with Eggers on the selection panel were Marlon James, Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women, and John Crow’s Devil; Amy Tan, bestselling author of seven novels such as The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter; and MacDowell Fellow and board member Julie Orringer, author of the short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater and the novel The Invisible Bridge.

Morrison was born in 1931 in Ohio and as a child fell in love with reading. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and a master’s degree from Cornell. She has taught English at Texas Southern University, Howard University, and Yale University, and is currently the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Since then, she has written 10 more novels to extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1978 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. In 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the last quarter-century. Morrison has also penned nonfiction, two plays, and the libretto for the opera Margaret Garner. In addition to the Nobel, Pulitzer, many other literary prizes, and most recently the PEN Award for Achievement in American Fiction, she has received numerous honorary degrees as well MacDowell Chairman Michael Chabon and as the Presidential Medal author Toni Morrison pose with the 57th of Freedom.

Edward MacDowell Medal in Savidge Library.

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MacDowell Medal Day supplement 2016 Editor: Jonathan Gourlay Design and Production: Melanie deForest Design, LLC All photographs not otherwise credited: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey The MacDowell Colony is located at 100 High Street Peterborough, NH 03458 Telephone: 603-924-3886 Fax: 603-924-9142 Administrative office: 163 East 81st Street New York, NY 10028 Telephone: 212-535-9690 Fax: 212-737-3803 Web site: www.macdowellcolony.org E-mail: newsletter@macdowellcolony.org The MacDowell Colony awards Fellowships to artists of exceptional talent, providing time, space, and an inspiring environment in which to do creative work. The Colony was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and pianist Marian Nevins MacDowell, his wife. Fellows receive room, board, and exclusive use of a studio. The sole criterion for acceptance is talent, as determined by a panel representing the discipline of the applicant. The MacDowell Colony was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997 for “nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists.”

Applications are available on our Web site at macdowellcolony.org.

Chairman: Michael Chabon President: Susan Davenport Austin Executive Director: Cheryl A. Young Resident Director: David Macy facebook.com/MacDowellColony portablemacdowell.org