Don’t Let an Artist Statement Stop You!: Demystifying the Conference and Residency Application with Reena Shah

Out of stock

Description

Editor's Note

Don’t Let an Artist Statement Stop You!: Demystifying the Conference and Residency Application with Reena Shah
Saturday, April 18
9 AM – 12 PM PT/ 12 PM – 3 PM ET
Online

As residency, summer conference, and scholarship season approaches, every application wants an artist statement or a statement of purpose or a project summary or a “why you want to attend” short answer. Those requests can elicit all sorts of feelings in writers, especially anxiety and confusion. What are these things? Why are they important? Are they important? While the work—our stories, poems, plays, screenplays, creative nonfiction—is most important, the other sections of an application can make the process feel like an especially heavy lift.

As someone who has not only attended residencies, workshops, and retreats but also read applications for these opportunities, and experienced rejections, I hope to shed light on the process, offer strategies to help writers generate artist statements and project summaries that feel good instead of icky, and hopefully make the application feel more manageable and less stressful. We’ll also touch on how to select writing samples to submit, how to prepare once you get in, why applying again after a rejection is highly recommended, and funding opportunities.

Scholarship
The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.

BIO: Reena Shah is the author of the novel Every Happiness (Bloomsbury Pub, 2026), an Indies Introduce pick for winter/spring 2026 and an Indie Next title for February 2026. Her story collection, Bad Neighbors, is forthcoming in 2027. Her work has appeared in swamp pink, Lit Hub, Debutiful, Electric Literature, the Masters Review, WaxwingMagazine, Joyland, BBC, The Guardian, and National Geographic, among others. She is the recipient of a Steinbeck Fellowship, the Keene Prize in Literature from the University of Texas in Austin, a Fulbright Scholarship, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship. For many years she was a kathak dancer with the Parul Shah Dance Company. She is a fiction editor at The Rumpus, teaches at a public school in Brooklyn, and lives in Roosevelt Island with her family.