Jourdan Imani Keith

Jourdan Keith was the 2006-2007 Seattle Poet Populist and a 2006 Jack Straw Writer. Her poetry and stories blend the textures of political, personal and natural landscapes to offer voices from the margins of American lives. She was awarded an individual artists grant from the City of Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in 2004 for the writing and performance of her choreopoem, The Uterine Files: Episode I, Voices Spitting Out Rainbows. She was 2005-2007 Writer-in-Residence with Seattle Arts and Lectures. She was a 2001 Writer-in-Residence at the Cottages at Hedgebrook, and a teaching artist for Book-It Repertory Theater, Powerful Schools and the Nature Consortium.

2011 GAP funding will allow Keith to continue to develop Coyote Autumn, a creative non-fiction collection. Her project and event goals are to research, complete, and present in a public reading creative nonfiction stories retelling a personal journey through the landscapes of Yellowstone and the history of the Gay and Lesbian movement in the 1990s. She needs to return to Yellowstone “to become unhinged again to pass through the corridors of canyons and trees” she has forgotten. GAP funding will pay for rustic lodging, a modest per diem, gas, and solitary time off to research and write so that she can offer a public reading in autumn 2011.