2017 Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts winner Emily Rapp Black

VCCA’s 2017 Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts winner, Emily Rapp Black will be in residence at VCCA in September. Selected from a highly competitive field of international applicants, Emily will receive, in addition to the a fully-funded residency, reimbursement of travel costs and honorarium. 

Emily is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Nonfiction. She was educated at Harvard University, St. Olaf College, Trinity College-Dublin, and the University of Texas-Austin where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. In addition to VCCA, Emily has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Jentel Arts Foundation, Fundacion Valparaiso, the Fine Arts Work Center, and Bucknell University, where she was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence.

Emily's work has appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Modern Loss, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, O the Oprah Magazine, The Sun, Lenny Letter, and in many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. Her next book, Casa Azul Cripple, is forthcoming from The New York Review of Books/Notting Hill Editions in 2018. Emily is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside. She lives in Palm Springs with her husband, writer and editor Kent Black, and their family.

The Wachtmeister Award acknowledges the vital role of the arts in our world, the importance of artists who exemplify excellence in their field, and the necessity of time and space for the creative phase of all artistic work. Endowed by VCCA Board member emerita Linda Wachtmeister and administered by the VCCA Fellows Council, the Wachtmeister Award is presented biennially on a rotating basis within disciplines to a prominent writer, visual artist or composer whose significant achievement in the arts is widely recognized.