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Lannan Residency Program

To write poetry, one must waste a good deal of time, one must simply “be,” one must wander around with no particular aim, and it is precisely from such a lacuna that poetry arises.  It is hard to explain, like most important things.  But in today’s world it has become harder and harder to waste time.  Artists are desperate for the simplest thing on earth: being.  The Marfa residency gave me that gift.
  — Mary Ruefle

Marfa is a remarkable place for any number of reasons, but I will always remember it as the green garden on the horizon that I pedaled towards on an old blue bike while my head rang with sentences and paragraphs I had yet to write down.  I arrived with approximately 15 pages of text and a few more pages of notes.  I left with the first half of the novel written and a very clear idea of where the rest of the book needs to go.  For this I give thanks to the Inca Doves, and the hummingbirds, and the trains that seemed always to whistle their arrival...
  — Benjamin Anastas

The Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship provides uninterrupted writing time for poets, writers, essayists, scholars, curators, as well as indigenous, environmental and social justice activists.  Residency durations are usually from one to two months.

Since the fall of 2000, more than 100 residency fellows have been housed in Lannan properties in Marfa, Texas, a small, beautiful, high desert ranching town in West Texas near the Chinati Mountains to the southwest and the Davis Mountains to the northeast.  Marfa is also home to the internationally known Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art organization founded by the late sculptor, Donald Judd.

Candidates for the residency program are selected through an internal nomination process.  Unsolicited applications are not accepted.