BMI Foundation Awards 9th Annual Woody Guthrie Fellowships
The winner of the ninth annual Woody Guthrie Fellowship has been announced by Deirdre Chadwick, President of the BMI Foundation, Inc., Deana McCloud, Executive Director of the Woody Guthrie Center, and Nora Guthrie, President of the Woody Guthrie Foundation. The program funds research fellowships for scholars to use the rich and extensive archival holdings available at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
2014 Woody Guthrie Fellowship recipient, Dr. Will Kaufman is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England. His celebrated political biography, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Illinois, 2011) was written on the strength of a 2008 BMI Foundation Woody Guthrie Fellowship. Kaufman has published extensively on Guthrie (as well as other aspects of American culture) and has performed his live musical documentaries – Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’ and Woody Guthrie: The Long Road to Peekskill – at hundreds of public venues on both sides of the Atlantic (see www.willkaufman.com). Most recently he was consultant to Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp in the editing of Guthrie’s newly discovered novel, House of Earth (2013). Kaufman’s new project, Woody Guthrie, American Modernist, examines Guthrie’s relation to American modernism.
The Woody Guthrie Center seeks to preserve and communicate the social, political, and cultural values that Woody Guthrie contributed to the world through his life, his music, and his work. Housed within the Center, the Woody Guthrie Archives is a paper-based research repository providing support to scholars exploring the many facets of Woody Guthrie’s life, legacy, and contribution to American and world culture. Originally opened in New York City in 1996, the Archives holds over 15,000 items – the largest collection of Woody Guthrie material in the world – and includes Guthrie’s original song lyrics, notebooks and diaries, manuscripts, photographs, correspondences, personal papers, scrapbooks, artwork, and audio recordings.