The National League of American Pen Women, Inc. awards three grants of $1,000 each in art, letters, and music to women 35 years of age or older who are not now nor ever have been a member of NLAPW. The recipients are selected via a competitive application process. Congratulations to the 2021 recipients!
Art: Annie K. Halvorsen
Annie Karl Halvorsen of Kittery Point, Maine, is a retired registered nurse who found painting by accident in late 2018. She purchased her first set of soft pastels in the fall of 2019, just before the pandemic, and has been enthralled with their immediacy and versatility ever since.
Halvorsen has degrees from Kirkland College (now Hamilton College, Clinton, New York), University of Washington (Seattle), and University of Massachusetts (Boston), all in bioscience and healthcare. Much of her painting education has been free, high-quality teaching videos on the internet.
Her principal medium is pastel and mixed media, but she is venturing out into the big, beautiful world of oil, gouache, and acrylic. She is driven by an intense curiosity about how to create her vision, both in design and medium, and loves to make mistakes.
Halvorsen has had a few small local shows and has begun to show her work in juried national shows and society member shows. She plans to spend some of her grant funding for another class, and some toward an artist-in-resident program she had been accepted to in Europe.
Letters: L. Renée
L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. She collects oral histories; preserves her family’s archive of papers, photographs, and domestic artifacts; and writes the stories of her ancestors — from the tobacco fields of Virginia to the coal mines of West Virginia.
Nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, her work has been anthologized in “Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak: Volume 6” and was selected as a 2021 Rattle poetry award finalist. L. Renée has received numerous other awards, including the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Alumni Award, Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, and second place for the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize from PLUCK!, The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review. Her poems have been published in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
L. Renée holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Indiana University, where she served as nonfiction editor of Indiana Review and associate director of the Indiana University Writers Conference. She also earned a Master of Science in journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. L. Renée believes in Black joy and expresses it through her various works and on Instagram @lreneepoems.
Music: Katie Combs
Katie Combs is a published songwriter who has created multiple children’s and young adult scripts and full musicals for live theater. She is passionate about creating projects that challenge, educate, and inspire. Her specialty is writing age-appropriate and targeted-audience material on emotionally or scientifically complicated topics. Past projects include the End of Life Exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry and Holocaust educational materials.
Combs’ latest project, a musical about the intersection of teens, technology, and mental health, is now a feature film scheduled for release in 2022. She currently teaches vocal technique and serves as the director for Bay Area Performing Arts & Casting, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping the next generation with the skills to work professionally in the arts.