The Write Stuff

Austin poet and professor honored with prestigious national award

Cyrus Cassells has been named the 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow for Texas.

Courtesy of Academy of American Poets

A local wordsmith has received one of the highest honors a writer can achieve. Austin resident Cyrus Cassells has been named the 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow for Texas.

Cassells will receive $50,000 for the honor, as part of the $1.1 million worth of funding from the Academy awarded to 22 national fellows to support their respective public poetry programs during their year-long term.

Cassells is a tenured professor at Texas State University, and has received multiple awards for his work, including a Pushcart Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

He plans to hold a statewide poetry contest in honor of Juneteenth, inviting students in the 6th through 12th grades across Texas to submit entries describing what makes the day significant to them.

Ten winners will be selected; they'll receive a travel stipend to the state capital, where the contest will end with a public reading and ceremony at the Neill-Cochran House Museum. The space features Austin's only intact slave cabin and has long served as a venue for African American events and cultural exhibitions.

Judges for the contest include Texas poets Wendy Barker, Jennifer Chang, Amanda Johnston, and Roger Reeves, and Texas historian Martha Hartzog, according to the academy. The contest screeners and judges, along with the top three winners and seven honorable mentions will receive an honorarium, plus copies of Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Reed's book On Juneteenth and Edward Cotham Jr.'s Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration.

One other Texan joins Cassells as Poet Laureate: Houston wordsmith Outspoken Bean, who has been named the 2022 official Poet Laureate Fellow for Houston.

Emanuelee Outspoken Bean is an acclaimed spoken word artist who was the first poet to perform on the Houston Ballet stage in the company's production of the popular Play. He also conceptualized and produced Plus Fest: The Everything Plus Poetry Festival. He most recently took the stage for Loveletter, the multi-disciplinary concert hosted and produced by local legend DJ Sun.

During his term as Poet Laureate Fellow, he will complete Space City Mixtape, a spoken-word and creative audio experience of Houston featuring more than 20 tracks from Houstonians telling their stories, the academy notes. Houstonians should look for him at Houston Public Library locations around Houston, as he intends to conduct bi-weekly writing sessions for the next six to eight months in order to capture stories for Space City Mixtape, which will be produced by local producer Russell Guess. Space City Mixtape is slated to be released next year.

Public Poets Laureate have been around since 1919, when the state of Colorado named the first. Fifteen other states named laureates of their own soon after. On the national level, the Library of Congress named Joseph Auslander its first Consultant in Poetry in 1937. This position was renamed the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 1985.

Ada Limón is the current Poet Laureate Consultation in Poetry and was named to the position last month.

Poets Laureate at every level promote and advocate for poetry, working to not only bring attention to the art form, but also using their platform to bring attention to issues of importance in their communities. The Academy of American Poets is the largest supporter of poets around the U.S. and has donated more than $4.3 million in fellowships to 81 poets since 2019.

The other poets and the communities they represent are Andru Defeye (Sacramento, California); Ashanti Files (Urbana, Illinois); B. K. Fischer (Westchester County, New York); KaNikki Jakarta (Alexandria, Virginia); Ashley M. Jones (Alabama); Holly Karapetkova (Arlington, Virginia); Kealoha (Hawaiʻi); J. Drew Lanham (Edgefield, South Carolina); Julia B. Levine (Davis, California); Matt Mason (Nebraska); Airea D. Matthews (Philadelphia); Ray McNiece (Cleveland Heights, Ohio); Huascar Medina (Kansas); Gailmarie Pahmeier (Nevada); Catherine Pierce (Mississippi); Rena Priest (Washington); Lynne Thompson (Los Angeles); Emma Trelles (Santa Barbara, California); Gwen Nell Westerman (Minnesota); and Crystal Wilkinson (Kentucky).

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New

Historic Austin museum will close for more than a year for restoration

Photo courtesy of the City of Austin

The Elisabet Ney Museum will close at the end of 2024 and reopen in mid-2026.

Every building needs some maintenance here or there, and the historic Elisabet Ney Museum needs some extra-special care. Formerly the art studio and residence of its namesake, it's been standing since 1892. It'll spend 2025 in relative solitude, as it undergoes renovation for a year and a half with no visitors allowed.

The museum will close to the public December 30, 2024, and open again in the summer of 2026 if all goes according to plan, a news release from the City of Austin shares. It'll be a quiet period compared to the 21,000 people visiting from around the world each year.

According to a museum overview on the city's website, Elisabet Ney, a European portrait sculptor, bought the property and called her new studio Formosa. She worked on sculptures depicting important Texans like Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, and collected works of European contemporaries.

The building at 304 East 44th St. includes 3,700 square feet of museum space, which was converted by Ney's friends after her death in 1907. It retains its unique look that juxtaposes a Neo-Classical main studio from 1892 with a later addition from 1902 including a tower for her husband, Edmund, to write in. It is also on 2.5 acres of land, which has largely been restored to its natural state with native species.

A press release lists these tasks (verbatim) within the scope of the new work, referred to as the Capital Improvement Project (CIP):

Restoration of original exterior wood doors and windows
Upgrades and replacement of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system
Replacement of the exhibit and general lighting systems
Repairs to the roof, masonry, plumbing, and interior finishes.

There will also be work to do outside of the building. Workers will replace the pedestrian bridge across Waller Creek, stabilize a 20,000-square-foot portion of the bank, and make the grounds more accessible by adding new pathways.

Funding comes from several sources, according to a release: "the 2012 Bond, Proposition 14, the Parkland Dedication Fund, the Historic Preservation Fund, Partners in Preservation through the National Trust, and contributions from the Friends of the Elisabet Ney Museum."

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