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With an eye to nurturing a new
generation of artists, since 1993 the Cleveland Arts Prize
has awarded scholarships to outstanding college students interested
in pursuing a career in the fine arts. The scholarships are
presented to juniors or seniors from Northeast Ohio majoring
in architectural design, dance, literature, music, or the
visual arts at an accredited college, institute, conservatory,
or university.
This year’s $1,000 scholarship
is made possible with underwriting from the Cleveland Women’s
City Club Foundation (CWCCF), a tax-exempt public charity,
formed in 1948, that awards grants to organizations that serve
the Greater Cleveland community.
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The
2003 Cleveland Women’s City Club Foundation/Cleveland Arts
Prize Scholarship has been awarded to Feowyn MacKinnon of
Cleveland.
Feowyn
MacKinnon is a junior at Cleveland State University this year,
majoring in English and creative writing. She has a 3.2 cumulative
grade point average, and was named to the Dean’s Honor Roll
in the College of Arts and Sciences last spring.
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Feowyn MacKinnon |
A
graduate of the Cleveland School of the Arts, Feowyn has won recognition
from the Marilyn Bianchi Kids’ Playwriting Festival for her play,
The 12-Year Rules, protesting adolescent conformity. Her
poems have been published in an Interlochen summer camp anthology.
Born on December 25, she is currently working on a book entitled
Christmas Stories, with chapters that explore the changing
dynamics surrounding each of the holidays that she has celebrated
with her family.
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Christmas
Story
My
life is a series of bad Christmas’s
each year getting worse
Full of vacant beds and trips to urgent care
with 12 drunken Santa’s one by one stepping on scales
proving that even they are obese.
All of us weighing the bad with the good,
The lost with the good
the ugly with the good,
11 Christmas cards reading “god Bless your broken home”
10 of those from families that think they are better than
us
our broken family whose presents were stolen
by a father who wants happiness for no one,
a father who wants to kidnap us and move us
9 states away
resenting elders who whisper that I’ve ruined Christmas,
and dead grandparents hanging over our heads in the form of
8 stockings hanging above the fireplace.
Long early days spent making Christmas dinner,
frozen Christmas dinner
while our mother spends her evening alone in a white carved
room
with a pain somewhere,
it doesn’t matter where,
It’s somewhere.
7 of my mothers Friends
convening in our house,
the smell of gold, myrrh, and cannabis,
just like the very first Christmas of course,
leaking from behind the basement doors.
The secret of x-con parents and
6 felonies to hide
from the world that already knows.
And then there’s me
The savior reincarnated in a chubby girl
Who cries on her birthday and can’t sleep with the light on
With 5 other things I’d rather be doing on Christmas
4 reasons my mothers no sacred virgin
3 wives before her
2 of the wise men missing
And that damn partridge stuck in my pear tree.
—Copyright
© 2003 by Feowyn MacKinnon
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Feowyn’s
job as a Progressive Insurance customer service rep is underwriting
her college education. She understands her chances of becoming a “starving
artist,” but remains passionately committed to her art.
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